On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 3:54 PM, Pandu Poluan <pa...@poluan.info> wrote:
> -original message-
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Any way around "Argument list too long"?
> From: Alan Mackenzie <a...@muc.de>
> Date: 2011-07-18 02:42
>
>>Hi, Grant.
>>
>>On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 12:32:42PM -0700, Grant wrote:
>>> My crontab deletes all files of a certain type in a certain folder
>>> with yesterday's date in the filename. It usually executes but
>>> sometimes fails with:
>>
>>> /bin/rm: Argument list too long
>>
>>> What would you do about this?
>>
>>Use xargs - in place of
>> /bin/rm lots of files ......
>>
>>Use
>> Lots_of_file_names | xargs rm
>>
>>. xargs then calls rm several times with batches of filenames each time.
>>xargs is a standard Unix command.
>
> You'll want to be extra careful with special characters like (space), single
> quote, and double quote.
>
> Better use find ..... -exec rm {} +
>
This is why I use 'find' with the -print0 parameter.
find (path) (filespec) -print0|xargs -0 command
--
:wq
