RedHat 7.3
./spool/mqueue is 2.9 GB and the root parition is 100% full. In order to recover space until I can get to the root cause of the problem I want to delete the files in mqueue. I've stopped Sendmail and tried rm -rf * . . . which give the following error: bash:/bin/rm: Argument list too long. What steps should I take?

why are you using 3 dots (...)?

i would cd to the directory then type rm -rf *.

make sure you're in the correct directory though!

i.e not "/"

cd var/spool/mqueue
rm -rf *

This did not work. Still giving error: bash:/bin/rm: Argument list too long message. Additionl suggestions would be appreciated.

There are too many files on mqueue !
Go to a directory below and remove mqueue (rm -rf mqueue).
Before that, take note owner/permissions of mqueue (ls -ld mqueue) to be able to re-create it with the same permissions (chown, chmod).

try >/var/spool/mqueue

U might need to have permissions to do this.
Check if u have sudo access

Although this question is an old one, this info may be handy for someone having the same issue;

The error message is happening because when the wildcard * is used with a command, Linux will go through the directory and build a list of the files it's going to delete. Since there's so many of them, it runs out of room to store the list of files.

One way around it is to use the find command with the -exec option. This will run a separate rm command for each file found by find, rather than trying to do them all at once.


find /var/spool/mqueue -type f -exec rm -f {} \;

-type f : searches for files only
-exec : do the following command. {} is where find will put the name of the find result to be acted on by the command.
rm -f : include the -f force option to stop it prompting you to remove every file

You could add other things to the find command , such as

find /var/spool/mqueue -type f -mtime +5 -exec rm -f {} \;

-mtime +5 will only delete message older than five days, so you don't need to delete the whole queue

Hope that helps someone out there.