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 …
rm -f *
… you get get the following error
"bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long"
The easiest way round this is to use find and pipe the results to xargs command.
Try the following -
find . -P -H -name '*' | xargs rm -f
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.
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