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I want to write a short bash script to rm all files in a directory. I have a couple of directories that have too many files to use wild cards (!, returns a 'too many arguements error), which is hosing up my machine. So, I want to use a bash script that deletes them one at a time (perhaps a repeating loop that deletes the first file in the directory, the most recent file or whatever). My bash skills are negligible. Can anyone suggest a short script?
I posted something similar in the Newbie sections, which has a description of the more general problem.
Perl or Pyhton could do this also. One algorithm would be:
1. Get a directory listing into an array or list.
2. Filter out any file you do not want deleted (namely . and ..)
3. iterate over the array and exec the rm command for each filename.
How about a cron job that "rm -rf /whatever/directory/you/want/whatever_wildcard_you_want*" every once in a while? Any ideas why this doesn't work? Why are you getting the "too many arguments" error?
Last edited by sewer_monkey; 06-14-2002 at 11:58 AM.
I havent read your other thread but if I wanted to delete everything in a directory, I would use "rm -rf /dir" & that removes EVERYTHING in the /dir, the r switch tell's it to recursively travel through the directory & f tell's it to force so your not repeatedly asked , are you sure?
The whole point was that he couldn't use wildcards because he had to many files. So with or without the -i options it wouldn't work either way.
But this is a very old thread so I'm sure he's got his solution by now.
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