[X-Unix] Trying to get rid of unwanted files

Cloyce D. Spradling cloyce+xunix at headgear.org
Thu May 13 13:56:54 PDT 2004


On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 06:49:20AM +1000, Mark Gibson wrote:

: OK. I'll give rm -f * a go (as I don't want to confirm each deletion).

You won't need -f if you aren't using the 'rm' alias that comes standard.
Invoke it with its full path (probably /bin/rm or /usr/bin/rm; no OSX system
on hand to check), and no confirmation will be needed.

You probably _do_ want the -f, though, in order to make it return success
no matter what happens.

: My concern is that there seems to be an upper limit to the number of 
: files that rm can cope with.

It's actually a shell issue.  To get around it, use xargs:

  cd <CUPS dir>; ls | xargs rm -f

Of course, one you've started using the Dreaded Pipe, there's no reason
to stop there:

  cd <CUPS dir>; ls | grep -v '^tmp$' | xargs rm -rf

and get that directory _REALLY_ clean!

--
Cloyce




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