[LUAU] How do you delete over 500,000 files in a directory

[Clifton Royston]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 09:23:54AM -1000, Matt Darnell wrote:
> Aloha,
> 
> We have a box with over 500,000 files in a direcotry. If I try 'rm m*' I get
> an error, something like 'too many arguments'
...
> All the files start with mgetty. I would like to prserve the other files in
> the directory and the directories below /var/log

  ls | grep '^mgetty' | perl -nle 'unlink;'

  find . -name 'mgetty*' -maxdepth 1 -print | perl -nle 'unlink;'

  find . -name 'mgetty*' -maxdepth 1 -print | xargs rm

  ... and numerous variations you can probably think of now that you've
got the idea.  Just avoid anything which requires the shell to do
globbing and you'll be fine.

  -- Clifton

-- 
    Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at iandicomputing.com / cliftonr at lava.net
       President  - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
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