Argument list too long error rm command

linux rm
Aditya picture Aditya · Jan 30, 2014 · Viewed 12.3k times · Source

I have a Linux based server using which i do some file manioulation and serve multiple other servers of mine.

Basically this server (say server1) takes input as .mp3 file from other servers and converts to other file formats (.wav, .txt and .xml) and sends the asked response to other servers.

Over a period of time this folder of mine (Say /Somepath/MyInputFolder) has now GBs of data which i want to delete.

I tried the rm -r * command but it says:

Argument list too long

I also tried rm -r *.mp3 and rm -r *.txt to delete these files separately, but its gives the same error.

I also tried this SO question and read this link.

I tried the solution of above SO question and got the error as warning.

find . -name "*.txt" -maxdepth 1 -print0 | xargs -0 rm
find: warning: you have specified the -maxdepth option after a non-option argument -name, but options are not positional (-maxdepth affects tests specified before it as well as those specified after it).  Please specify options before other arguments.

How can i achieve this?

Answer

kasoban picture kasoban · Jan 30, 2014

As already stated in the comment to the answer you linked, you need to put the -maxdepth directly after the path. Like so:

find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

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