Argument list too long error for rm, cp, mv comman

Question

I have several hundred PDFs under a directory in UNIX. The names of the PDFs are really long (approx. 60 chars).

When I try to delete all PDFs together using the following command:

rm -f *.pdf

I get the following error:

/bin/rm: cannot execute [Argument list too long]

What is the solution to this error? Does this error occur for mv and cp commands as well? If yes, how to solve for these commands?

Answer 1

I'm surprised there are no ulimit answers here. Every time I have this problem I end up here or here. I understand this solution has limitations but ulimit -s 65536 seems to often do the trick for me.

Answer 2

Try this also If you wanna delete above 30/90 days (+) or else below 30/90(-) days files/folders then you can use the below ex commands

Ex: For 90days excludes above after 90days files/folders deletes, it means 91,92....100 days

find <path> -type f -mtime +90 -exec rm -rf {} \;

Ex: For only latest 30days files that you wanna delete then use the below command (-)

find <path> -type f -mtime -30 -exec rm -rf {} \;

If you wanna giz the files for more than 2 days files

find <path> -type f -mtime +2 -exec gzip {} \;

If you wanna see the files/folders only from past one month . Ex:

find <path> -type f -mtime -30 -exec ls -lrt {} \;

Above 30days more only then list the files/folders Ex:

find <path> -type f -mtime +30 -exec ls -lrt {} \;

find /opt/app/logs -type f -mtime +30 -exec ls -lrt {} \;

Answer 3

Suppose input directory name is input and output directory name is output. Then you can use simple loop to copy all

for f in input/*
do
cp $f output
done

Answer 4

I have faced a similar problem when there were millions of useless log files created by an application which filled up all inodes. I resorted to "locate", got all the files "located"d into a text file and then removed them one by one. Took a while but did the job!

Answer 5

The reason this occurs is because bash actually expands the asterisk to every matching file, producing a very long command line.

Try this:

find . -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Warning: this is a recursive search and will find (and delete) files in subdirectories as well. Tack on -f to the rm command only if you are sure you don't want confirmation.

You can do the following to make the command non-recursive:

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

Another option is to use find's -delete flag:

find . -name "*.pdf" -delete

Answer 6

The rm command has a limitation of files which you can remove simultaneous.

One possibility you can remove them using multiple times the rm command bases on your file patterns, like:

rm -f A*.pdf
rm -f B*.pdf
rm -f C*.pdf
...
rm -f *.pdf

You can also remove them trough find command:

find . -name "*.pdf" -exec rm {} \;