pjh@mccc.UUCP (Pete Holsberg) (03/01/89)
I have so many .ara????, .arb????, .ina????? and .inb??? in
/usr2/spool/news that any command that uses metacharacters returns with
the "too many arguments" message, and ls runs out of memory and dumps core!
How can I either process these or get rid of them?
Thanks,
Pete
--
Pete Holsberg UUCP: {...!rutgers!}princeton!mccc!pjh
Mercer College CompuServe: 70240,334
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Trenton, NJ 08690 Voice: 1-609-586-4800karl@triceratops.cis.ohio-state.edu (Karl Kleinpaste) (03/01/89)
pjh@mccc.UUCP (Pete Holsberg) writes: I have so many .ara????, .arb????, .ina????? and .inb??? in /usr2/spool/news that any command that uses metacharacters returns with the "too many arguments" message, and ls runs out of memory and dumps core! How can I either process these or get rid of them? # for i in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 > do > for j in ar in > do > for k in a b > do > rm .$j$k*$i > done > done > done That should give it to the shell in metachar-manageable pieces. But don't expect it to be fast. If not, there's always "rm -fr ..." --Karl
jr@amanue.UUCP (Jim Rosenberg) (03/04/89)
In article <629@mccc.UUCP> pjh@mccc.UUCP (Pete Holsberg) writes: >I have so many .ara????, .arb????, .ina????? and .inb??? in >/usr2/spool/news that any command that uses metacharacters returns with >the "too many arguments" message, and ls runs out of memory and dumps core! > >How can I either process these or get rid of them? In a word, xargs. xargs is indispensable in getting around the 1001 ways the limits on the size of an arg list can bite you. Something like this: cd /usr2/spool/news ls | grep '^[.]ara' | xargs rm -f Oops you said even ls gags. Well in that case you can try cd /usr2/spool/news find . -print | grep '^[.]/[.]ara' | xargs rm -f This is a real peeg to walk the whole tree just to get the current directory -- you could always bang out a quick C program to read . using Gwyn's dirent library if you don't have one. (BTW \. would work fine in place of [.] in the regular expressions, but I make it a habit to escape metacharacters in regular expressions with brackets because that works with parentheses too. \( is not the same thing as [(]!!!) The nifty thing about UNIX is that there are always so many ways to do something when one doesn't work you can try another. -- Jim Rosenberg CIS: 71515,124 decvax!idis! \ WELL: jer allegra! ---- pitt!amanue!jr BIX: jrosenberg uunet!cmcl2!cadre! /