unix question: files per directory

Robert C. White Jr. rwhite at nusdhub.UUCP
Fri Apr 21 09:19:40 AEST 1989


> In article <776 at helios.toronto.edu> sysruth at helios.physics.utoronto.ca (Ruth Milner) writes:
>>When cleaning up after
>>installing the NAG library, I tried to "rm *" in the source code directory.
>>It refused (I think the error was "too many files").

The shell cant make an argumetn list that long... do the following:

ls | xargs rm

The ls will produce a list of files to standard output and xargs will
repeatedly call it's arguments as a command with as many additional
arguments as it can, taking these additional arguments from it's
standard input...

WALLHAH! rm of a long directory.



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