-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 According to Morten Kjarulff on 8/22/2005 6:56 AM: > Hi, > > If I try to rm many files, or fewer files with long names I get "bash: > /usr/bin/rm: Argument list too long". Can anyone tell the limits?
The limits are pretty low if you are using Windows mechanisms, although I don't know the exact limit (they can be increased by mounting /bin as cygwin-executable, but even then still have limits). But generally, if you are trying to pass that much data on the command line, there is usually a better solution that does not even expand the wildcard. > > Is the solution something like "for file in * ; do rm $file ; done"? It is, if you don't mind doing it one file at a time. If you don't mind deleting the directory, there is always this (let rm do the recursion, instead of calling out every file yourself): cd .. && rm -R tmp Or if you want to delete as fast as possible without surpassing command-line limits, there is this (it works, since echo is a shell builtin, and since xargs is getting the list from stdin and not the command line, then calling rm as many times as needed with a group of filenames as command-line arguments): echo * | xargs rm By the way, this is not a cygwin-specific problem, it is just that cygwin tends to have a smaller command-line limit than many other platforms. > > same thing for ls: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] /tmp > $ ls * See the coreutils FAQ - 'ls' is MUCH more efficient than 'ls *', and does the SAME THING! http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/faq/coreutils-faq.html#Argument-list-too-long - -- Life is short - so eat dessert first! Eric Blake [EMAIL PROTECTED] volunteer cygwin coreutils maintainer -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Cygwin) Comment: Public key at home.comcast.net/~ericblake/eblake.gpg Comment: Using GnuPG with Thunderbird - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFDCdAm84KuGfSFAYARAnHtAJ9x3fynt113ri0ZYSFxmLkrYKT4rwCfffhs zLXtaL1CGL4Yu3aekRGYH14= =b+Y1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/
