Comments on: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

By: Ryan Thompson

Ryan Thompson — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 17:01:51 +0000

Thanks for this info. My drive was nearly maxed and I did not know how to get passed the ‘Argument List Too Long’ issue. This worked well and it only took a few minutes to get rid of over 5GB of files.

BTW… I tried the other suggested method: find . -name ?11*? | xargs rm method but I continued to get the ‘Argument List Too Long’ error with it.

By: Drew

Drew — Sat, 26 Apr 2008 22:11:49 +0000

Eric,

Great! Glad I could help.

Regards,
Drew

By: Eric Amundson

Eric Amundson — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 14:41:49 +0000

That is AWESOME! Thanks so much – I’ve been looking for an easy way to get around this ‘Argument List Too Long’ error.

This worked perfectly.

By: Drew

Drew — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:29:58 +0000

Thanks Drew, I just deleted 817 million CCTV images with this, saved my bacon. It did take a few days!

Wow! That’s awesome! Glad I could help :)

Regards,
Drew

By: Jim Smith

Jim Smith — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 22:16:13 +0000

Thanks Drew, I just deleted 817 million CCTV images with this, saved my bacon. It did take a few days!

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 18:00:56 +0000

Erin’s method caused a segmentation fault when processing a huge number of files in one particular directory.

Drew’s find example worked fine in that case.

Thanks, this was helpful.

By: Drew

Drew — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 06:25:47 +0000

@ Craig: Don’t know about that. I mean, I hope you aren’t another one of those “this took 2.345547 seconds longer to run than this other one” kind of guy. The original error I found was my fix and it is very efficient and fast :)

Regards,
Drew

By: Craig

Craig — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 05:56:56 +0000

Your solution is very slow and inefficient, as it’ll call rm once for every single file. What you want is:

find . -name ‘11*’ | xargs rm

By: Joe

Joe — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 22:09:52 +0000

It does.

By: Drew

Drew — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 21:15:29 +0000

Joe,

In order to do what you are wanting, you would simply change the search expression like so:
find . -name 'upgrade.txt.*' -exec rm "{}" ;

Also note that in your reply, you stated upgrade.txt.1, so that’s why I said make sure it says upgrade.txt.*

If you just want it to find anything with upgrade.txt, you would need to issue the following:
find . -name 'upgrade.txt*' -exec rm "{}" ;

Hope this helps!