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

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 fol

Answer 1

you can use this commend

find -name "*.pdf"  -delete

Answer 2

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 3

Using GNU parallel (sudo apt install parallel) is super easy

It runs the commands multithreaded where '{}' is the argument passed

E.g.

ls /tmp/myfiles* | parallel 'rm {}'

Answer 4

find has a -delete action:

find . -maxdepth 1 -name '*.pdf' -delete

Answer 5

What about a shorter and more reliable one?

for i in **/*.pdf; do rm "$i"; done

Answer 6

To delete all *.pdf in a directory /path/to/dir_with_pdf_files/

mkdir empty_dir        # Create temp empty dir

rsync -avh --delete --include '*.pdf' empty_dir/ /path/to/dir_with_pdf_files/

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To delete specific files via rsync using wildcard is probably the fastest solution in case you've millions of files. And it will take care of error you're getting.

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(Optional Step): DRY RUN. To check what will be deleted without deleting. `

rsync -avhn --delete --include '*.pdf' empty_dir/ /path/to/dir_with_pdf_files/

. . .

Click rsync tips and tricks for more rsync hacks