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

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 through the find command:

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

Answer 2

If they are filenames with spaces or special characters, use:

find -maxdepth 1 -name '*.pdf' -exec rm "{}" \;

This sentence search all files in the current directory (-maxdepth 1) with extension pdf (-name '*.pdf'), and then, delete each one (-exec rm "{}").

The expression {} replace the name of the file, and, "{}" set the filename as string, including spaces or special characters.

Answer 3

A bit safer version than using xargs, also not recursive: ls -p | grep -v '/$' | grep '\.pdf$' | while read file; do rm "$file"; done

Filtering our directories here is a bit unnecessary as 'rm' won't delete it anyway, and it can be removed for simplicity, but why run something that will definitely return error?

Answer 4

For remove first 100 files:

rm -rf 'ls | head -100'

Answer 5

The below option seems simple to this problem. I got this info from some other thread but it helped me.

for file in /usr/op/data/Software/temp/application/openpages-storage/*; do
    cp "$file" /opt/sw/op-storage/
done

Just run the above one command and it will do the task.

Answer 6

Or you can try:

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