Shell Programming and Scripting

Hi,

I have used a command rm *.txt in a directory which has about 2000 txt files.

but it is throwing the following error:

error: args list too long.

any ideas pls..

Code:

find /path/to/dir/ -iname '*.txt' -exec echo rm '{}' ';'

Run it once to be sure it picks the right files, then remove the 'echo' and run it again to do it for real.

Code:

rm `find -name "*.txt" `

The list generated is limited in size. Try breaking your request down to the size it can handle like:
rm a*.txt
rm b*.txt
and so forth. If one of the sub groups is too large you will need to break it down further.
I think the limit is 256 but it has been a while since I tried to difine it.

If it's too many arguments with globbing, how do you expect backticks to help cram them into one argument list? That's not going to work!

---------- Post updated at 01:47 PM ---------- Previous update was at 01:45 PM ----------

This is not an effective or general-purpose solution, especially since the size of a commandline may be limited by the size of the names and not just their number. The proper way to deal with it is to use pipes or tools, not to keep randomly trying different globs until you find one small enough.

find /path/to/dir/ -iname '*.pdf' -exec echo rm '{}' ';'

after running this command, I am getting the following error:

find: bad option -iname

Try 'name' instead. 'iname' is the case-insensitive variant supported by the GNU variant I usually use. And you are replacing /path/to/dir with the path to your dir, right?