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

Tue Jan 26 21:26:19 UTC 2010
Kurt Newman <knewman at globaldataguard.com>

What was your original find command?

Robert Nichols wrote:
> 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.
> 


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