One of the directories has millions of files, which is no more required. When trying to delete all files from that folder using the rm
command, I got below error message:
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/bin/rm : Argument list too long
If there are a large number of files in a single directory, Then the traditional rm
command can not delete all files and ends with an error message Argument list too long
.
To resolve this issue and delete all files use xargs command-line utility with the find command.
- First change to the directory where all files exists:
cd dir_contains_file
- Then execute command to delete all files in current directory and its sub directories.
WARNING – This will also delete files from subdirectories. Be careful with this command.find . -name '*' | xargs rm
That’s it. you will find all files are deleted now.
2 Comments
Tnks a lot, work great in Solaris 10
find . -iname ‘*’ -exec rm ‘{}’ \;