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From: bernie@DIALix.oz.au (Bernd Felsche)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.misc
Subject: Re: Arg list too long error? Here's a work-around.
Summary: Use xargs
Keywords: find, xargs
Message-ID: <602@DIALix.oz.au>
Date: 17 Nov 90 06:12:43 GMT
References: <1990Nov14.192707.1099@millipore.com> <1990Nov16.001140.11923@druid.uucp>
Organization: DIALix Services, Perth Western Australia
Lines: 40

In <1990Nov16.001140.11923@druid.uucp> darcy@druid.uucp (D'Arcy J.M. Cain) writes:

>In article <1990Nov14.192707.1099@millipore.com> Jeff Lampert writes:
>> [...]
>>The 'find' command does'nt seem to have the 'Arg list' limitation.  It also

'find' does have it, if you pass it too many arguments!  The command
used below hides filename expansion from the shell.  Ask what would 
happen if you hadn't quoted "SRW*"?

>>find . -name "SRW*" -exec rm {} \;
>> [...]

Unfortunate side-effect is that files with matching names in
subdirectories will also be removed.

The following method is slow and also requires many forks, making you
very popular on a busy system.

>ls | grep '^SRW' | while read X
>do rm $i
>done

We all know that the "best" way is to allow the shell to expand
filenames and echo them into xargs... right?

vis:
	echo SRW* | xargs -n10 

-n option defines the maximum number of arguments to pass to rm.
This may be too many for some older systems, or where pathnames are
very long... the -s option to xargs defines the size allowed, but
then, most users don't know what size to use...

I also thought that the 'xargs' debate had finished... but then,
maybe nobody read the second-last entry in the reference manual.
-- 
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