how to remove large amount of files using rm

Question

Hi ,

I tried to remove around 7,000 log files under a directory by using

rm *.log

but failed with error message "too long argument list" . Is there any way to slove it ?

thanks .

Answer 1

Try

find . -name '*.log' -delete

Note that this will also delete files in subdirectories. To avoid that, add -maxdepth 1 before the -delete

Answer 2

One way:

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

Answer 3

find <your-dir> -name '*.log' | xargs rm

is one way

Answer 4

I think the reason why this problem is with rm/ls and not with find, is because:

rm *.log appends all the files matching "*.log" to rm as argument so the system complains long argument list. So, i think simply:

ls | grep ".*\.log" | xargs rm 

also does the job.
In case of find, the directory is searched first and files are matched with the pattern and those satisfying it are deleted.

Answer 5

ls *.log | xargs -n 1000 rm

Answer 6

Addon : Using xargs, if there's space within the file name reference the below,

find ./ -iname 'someglob*' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf