UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi All,

i am writing a shell script in korn shell
which deletes all the files in a directory
once in every 10DAYS.

the directory has different format files.

the script has something like this;


cd /home/data/pavi
echo "Please Enter the Number of Days to search for"
read DAYS
echo "The entered number of days is $DAYS"
DOACTION="rm -rf"
find DD.* -maxdepth 1 -mtime +$DAYS -exec $DOACTION {} \;
find AA.* -maxdepth 1 -mtime +$DAYS -exec $DOACTION {} \;

the script is working fine DD.* extension.

But for those files with AA.* extension i am getting the following
error message;

pav.ksh[33]: find: Argument list too long.
there are total 22,309 files with AA.* extension.

can anyone please suggest me the best approach here,

thanks
pavi

Check the max length of arguments to exec:

Code:

grep 'ARG_MAX' /usr/include/limits.h

or Try this:

Code:

find AA.* -maxdepth 1 -mtime +$DAYS | xargs $DOACTION

Regards,
Tayyab

You should change these two lines into:

find . -name "DD.*" -maxdepth 1 -mtime +$DAYS -exec $DOACTION {} \;
find . -name "AA.*" -maxdepth 1 -mtime +$DAYS -exec $DOACTION {} \;

This error is produced by the use of "*". It means there are too many files on the directory. That's because of the shell's limits when using wildcards.

Regards.