PROGRAMS
rm (remove)
Article by:Geoffrey Hunter
Date Published: | |
Last Modified: |
Overview
rm
is a UNIX command for deleting files and directories on the file system.
Dealing With Special Characters
See Bash - Dealing With Special Characters for more information.
Argument list too long
If you provide too many files to delete to a single invocation of the rm
(e.g. you use the wildcard expression rm *.jpg
in bash to match a large number of images), you may get the following error:
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This is because bash expands the command to rm file1.jpg file2.jpg ...
and rm
only supports a limited number of arguments.
A workaround is to use find
instead:
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-maxdepth 1
is required to prevent find
from recursively going into subdirectories and deleting files from in there.
Instead of using the
delete
option, you could use find
in combination with piping and xargs
. However, this is likely to be less performant than -delete
as you are passing data between multiple processes. It is also more to type!Authors

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