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.