bug#28082: bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

[Pádraig Brady]

tag 28082 notabug
close 28082
stop

On 13/08/17 14:35, Jonny Grant wrote:
> Hello
> 
> Can this be resolved please? Seems a shame in 2017 on a machine with 
> 16GB of ram I suffer this. Each filename is around 40 bytes.
> 
> Roughly 60,000 files
> 
> So total strings around 2.4 MBytes. Quite a small limit.
> 
> $rm jonny*.*
> bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

The standard mechanism to scale this is to use xargs,
something like:

  find . -maxdepth 1 -name 'jonny*.*' -print0 | xargs -r0 rm

In any case this is not a limitation imposed by rm.

cheers,
Pádraig.