[CentOS] ls and rm: "argument list too long"

Fri Oct 17 10:48:16 UTC 2008
Geoff Galitz <geoff at galitz.org>

>> piping ls to xargs should do the trick. man xargs for details.

>Ok, thanks for ideas, Laurent and Lawrence.

>A strange limitation in ls and rm, though. My friend said he hasn't seen
>that in Fedora. 


Are you sure you are comparing apples to apples?  There is nothing
particularly Centos specific about this problem.  I've seen it on a variety
of *NIX systems over the years, though I presume some distributions or UNIX
variants may have upped the buffer size.

Here is an interesting blog post which illustrates how you can get into this
kind trouble:

http://stevenroddis.com/2006/10/07/binrm-argument-list-too-long/index.html



-geoff