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

i was facing same problem while copying form source directory to destination

source directory had files ~3 lakcs

i used cp with option -r and it's worked for me

cp -r abc/ def/

it will copy all files from abc to def without giving warning of Argument list too long

Answer 2

you can try this:

for f in *.pdf
do
  rm "$f"
done

EDIT: ThiefMaster comment suggest me not to disclose such dangerous practice to young shell's jedis, so I'll add a more "safer" version (for the sake of preserving things when someone has a "-rf . ..pdf" file)

echo "# Whooooo" > /tmp/dummy.sh
for f in '*.pdf'
do
   echo "rm -i \"$f\""
done >> /tmp/dummy.sh

After running the above, just open the /tmp/dummy.sh file in your favorite editor and check every single line for dangerous filenames, commenting them out if found.

Then copy the dummy.sh script in your working dir and run it.

All this for security reasons.

Answer 3

You could use a bash array:

files=(*.pdf)
for((I=0;I<${#files[@]};I+=1000)); do
    rm -f "${files[@]:I:1000}"
done

This way it will erase in batches of 1000 files per step.

Answer 4

You can create a temp folder, move all the files and sub-folders you want to keep into the temp folder then delete the old folder and rename the temp folder to the old folder try this example until you are confident to do it live:

mkdir testit
cd testit
mkdir big_folder tmp_folder
touch big_folder/file1.pdf
touch big_folder/file2.pdf
mv big_folder/file1,pdf tmp_folder/
rm -r big_folder
mv tmp_folder big_folder

the rm -r big_folder will remove all files in the big_folder no matter how many. You just have to be super careful you first have all the files/folders you want to keep, in this case it was file1.pdf

Answer 5

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 6

I only know a way around this. The idea is to export that list of pdf files you have into a file. Then split that file into several parts. Then remove pdf files listed in each part.

ls | grep .pdf > list.txt
wc -l list.txt

wc -l is to count how many line the list.txt contains. When you have the idea of how long it is, you can decide to split it in half, forth or something. Using split -l command For example, split it in 600 lines each.

split -l 600 list.txt

this will create a few file named xaa,xab,xac and so on depends on how you split it. Now to "import" each list in those file into command rm, use this:

rm $(<xaa)
rm $(<xab)
rm $(<xac)

Sorry for my bad english.