Operations

bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

Today, I needed to empty a folder through bash on my Linux server that contained a lot of files. The files where maybe 2kb, but all the files together contained over 400Mb.

So I used rm * to remove them, but it threw me a nice error: bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long . Looks like rm has its limits 🙂

Use ‘find’ to pipe all the matching files to ‘rm’, one at a time:

find . -name '*' | xargs rm

And I’m a happy camper again.

Published by Michaël Rigart

I'm the founder of Netronix, a software company that specializes in Ruby / Ruby on Rails development. I have been developing and deploying a wide variety of online business and content applications. Hands-on experience in Ruby & PHP, although my focus lies mostly on the cutting edge of Ruby / Rails programming.