I thought the trick when you couldn't do a straight up rm on a large number of files was to do a
find /path/* -mtime +7 -exec rm -rf {} \;
but is there a trick for when even that kicks back a too many warning? or do i just need to use it multiple times with a more specific wildcard?

Hm, really? How many files are you trying to delete? What is the specific text of the error message? I've not encountered such a problem before, but would be curious to see.

Anyway, you could of course split up the problem size.

If there's not another more direct solution with find.

think it's like over 480,000 or so? and i'm getting the too many arguments error.

Ah, maybe this, that glob is probably the issue:

Try this:

Again, please report your full error, with [ code ] tags.

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so no wildcard in that new one you want me to try? won't be able to try it till next week now unfortunately.

Right, I think the wildcard is the problem, not the find command itself.

That worked! Thanks. But can you explain again why this worked?

Unless quoted or escaped, globbing patterns such as "*" are expanded by the shell before the command is executed. So when you ran the above command, the shell was really trying to run this:

find only needs to be given the top-level director(y/ies) to start searching from, so it's not generally necessary to use globbing patterns there.

But note also that find has it's own built-in globbing ability, for use in options like -name. This is separate from the shell's globbing feature, and so these patterns must be quoted so that the shell passes them to the command as-is. e.g.:

Edit: Speaking of which, you'd probably want to add at least a -type f to your command, to keep it from deleting directories as well. You have to be careful not to match more than you intend it to, especially when deleting things.

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Ah, so that's why find was choking, it expands it right there. and now i know what a glob is too. thanks.