What to do when rm does not bc of too many files?

Thaidog · 03-04-2010, 11:31 PM

I got a crazy question asking if you go in to a directory filled with a ton of files and you try to remove them but rm complains there are too many files what do you do? (I know - such an everyday occurrence.. why don't I know!)

kbp · 03-04-2010, 11:34 PM

Remove them in chunks ..? 'rm a*' 'rm b*' ...

<edit>Could also try combining 'find' with 'xargs rm'</edit>

Thaidog · 03-04-2010, 11:45 PM

After thinking about it I wonder if you could not just move them all to a folder and try to rm -rf the folder. But then they might have said it was the temp folder and you can move them because they are encrypted.

Do you know for certain the xargs thing works?

Something like:

Find -name /tmp * | xargs rm -f

kbp · 03-04-2010, 11:55 PM

Yeah... it has for me in the past

Thaidog · 03-04-2010, 11:57 PM

Ok that is officially in my crazy interview questions file then....

i92guboj · 03-05-2010, 05:59 AM

xargs is the best way, the most efficient one.

You might want to research into this however:

Code:

find /path/to -print0 | xargs -0 rm

You don't really need a -name or -iname to remove all the files. And using nulls as separators ensure that a funky file name won't break the thing.