I delete them by character... e.g. rm -rf *1.tmp, rm -rf *2.tmp, and so on. Don't know of any other way to do it. - although I wrote a little C program once to handle it for me.
-Tom
-----Original Message----- From: redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Chris Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 1:19 PM To: redhat-list@xxxxxxxxxx Subject: Large number of files in single directory
There seems to be a filesystem limitation on most flavors of Linux I've worked on, in terms of a max number of files in a single directory - before tools like tar, gzip, rm, mv, cp and others stop working properly. For example, I have some users that have 2000+ files in a single directory (some as many as 10,000 files) and trying to tar these directories is always coming up with "argument list too long."
This is beacue of the limit of the length of the command line. There is a limit on the number of files in a directory but I don't knoiw what it is and I haven't hit it yet. IIRC, the targets I've dealt with was 40K+
Is there a way for tar and these other tools to "see" all these files and process them as normal? I recall once I had to resort to something like "find . -print | xargs rm -fr" to remove thousands of files from a single directory. Is doing something similar but replacing "rm" with "tar" the only way to make this work, or does tar have some sort of command line switch (I couldn't find one) to work with extremely long argument lists?
Try:
$ find <directory> -exec tar -avf foo.tar {} \;Chris
-- Stephen Carville <stephen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Unix and Network Admin Nationwide Totalflood 6033 W. Century Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90045 310-342-3602
-- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
