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

Tue Jan 26 21:30:50 UTC 2010
Kwan Lowe <kwan.lowe at gmail.com>

On Tue, Jan 26, 2010 at 1:15 PM, Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com> 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.

To illustrate what you and others were saying I did the following:

  [kwan at linbox find_test]$ cat add_one.sh
  #!/bin/sh

  COUNTER=`cat counter`
  COUNTER=`expr ${COUNTER} + 1`
  echo ${COUNTER}
  echo "${COUNTER}" > counter

  [kwan at linbox find_test] mkdir foo; cd foo; for i in $(seq 1 1 20);
do touch a${i}; done

  [kwan at linbox find_test]$ ls
  add_one.sh  counter  foo

  [kwan at linbox find_test]$ ls foo
  a1  a10  a11  a12  a13  a14  a15  a16  a17  a18  a19  a2  a20  a3
a4  a5  a6  a7  a8  a9


  [kwan at linbox find_test]$ echo "0">counter
  [kwan at linbox find_test]$ find foo -name "a*" |xargs ./add_one.sh
  1
  [kwan at linbox find_test]$ echo "0">counter
  [kwan at linbox find_test]$ find foo -name "a*" -exec ./add_one.sh {} \;
 1
 2
[snip]
 18
 19
 20

Finally:
  [kwan at linbox find_test]$ find foo -name a* -exec ./add_one.sh {} \;
  [kwan at linbox find_test]$

(This last one has no results because the a* is not quoted and
therefore expanded by the shell before it hits the find command. )