billions of files, ext3, reiser, and ls -aly

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, John Moniz wrote:

> Lennart Sorensen wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 03:20:19AM -0500, Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
>>
>> >   If the command is 'ls -al' you will not get a 'too many arguments'
>> >   error, because there are not too many arguments; there are none
>> >   besides the options. If you use 'ls -al *' you may, and it depends
>> >   on the system (glibc may be part of it) and how many arguments (and
>> >   possibly the maximum length of the arguments).
>>
>> The shell will have a command line limit usually.  I think older
>> versions of bash it was 32768 characters, but I think it is more like
>> 128000 now.  Not sure.  I almost never exceed it, and when I do I know
>> how to use find and xargs.  Almost certainly the limit depends on the
>> libc, the version of the shell, and various other factors.
>
> I just ran into a similar problem trying to delete a bunch of unwanted files
> (cache for various programs mainly). In one case, there was a huge quantity
> of files in the directory and a 'rm -f ./*' gave me an error of too many
> arguments. I had to do it in chunks such as 'rm -f ./*.png' etc, grouping as
> many files together as possible. Should I have done this with a different
> command?

        There are various ways to do it. If the files are sensibly named
        (no spaces or other pathological characters), it it relatively
        easy, e.g.:

    xargs rm < <(ls .)

    printf "%s\n" * | xargs rm  ## printf is a bash builtin

-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                      <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
    ===================================================================
    Author:
    Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
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