[CentOS] The directory that I am trying to clean up is huge

Tue Jan 26 21:18:00 UTC 2010
Robert Nichols <rnicholsNOSPAM at comcast.net>

Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 1/26/2010 11:42 AM, James B. Byrne wrote:
>> On Mon, January 25, 2010 13:40, Les Mikesell wrote:
>> .
>>> I'd say it is more likely that the command that resulted in an error
>>> wasn't exactly what was posted or there is a filesystem problem.
>>>
>> I do not consider a file system issue, as in error or corruption,
>> highly probable in this case.  It might be, however, that something
>> returned by the find caused rm itself to choke.
> 
> Causing one instance of the per-file rm invocations to choke shouldn't 
> bother the rest.  And while file system corruption isn't likely, it is 
> still a possible cause of generally-strange behavior.  The most probable 
> thing still seems like there was an unquoted * on the line that was 
> actually typed when the error was reported.

Indeed, upon closer examination, that message:

        -bash: /usr/bin/find: Argument list too long

came from the login shell, not from 'find', and indicates that the
shell got a failure return with errno==E2BIG when it tried to exec()
/usr/bin/find.  The 'find' command was never executed.

-- 
Bob Nichols     "NOSPAM" is really part of my email address.
                 Do NOT delete it.