bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

Yesterday I was trying to delete rather a lot of files from a server that had been used as a spam relay.

There were a total of 2.2 million files in the /var/spool/mqueue folder (and another 2 million in the /var/spool/clientmqueue folder!).

If you try to delete this many files from a folder using …

… you get get the following error

The easiest way round this is to use find and pipe the results to xargs command.

Try the following -

Use the -P and -H so that your find command doesn’t go off following links and make sure that your wildcard (*) is enclosed in single quotes or you’ll still run into problems.

Last updated by matt.

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