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. > -- Global DataGuard, Inc. Software Engineer Phone: (214) 980-1444 ext. 242 Cel: (214) 682-1978 Email: knewman at globaldataguard.com