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From: Malte Lance <malte.lance@gmx.net>
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Date: Sat, 15 Aug 1998 13:52:13 +0200 (CEST)
To: Juergen Nickelsen <ni@tellique.de>
Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: removing files
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Juergen Nickelsen writes:
 > Malte Lance wrote:
 > 
 > >  > Let's say I have a directory with la.txt and foo.sh and 6 million
 > >  > other files.
 > [...]
 > >  > Can I issue a command that says: delete everything BUT la.txt and
 > >  > foo.sh
 > [...]
 > >   rm -f `/bin/ls /tmp/. | grep -v -e la.txt | grep -v -e foo.sh`
 > 
 > You haven't tried that, have you?

Never had the need for.

 > 
 > First, your approach fails to delete the files "hola.txt" and
 > "foo.shut", which, though not mentioned, of course need to be removed as
 > well.

To fix the RE-problem:
rm -f `/bin/ls /tmp/. | grep -v -e '^la.txt$' | grep -v -e '^foo.sh$'`

 > 
 > Second, deleting a large number of files as this one is tricky in
 > itself. Even "rm *" does not work, since the argument list passed to
 > exec is too long. ARG_MAX is 64K by default, which is easily reached by
 > 11000 Files with names 6 characters long.
 > 
 > Provided the shell can handle a "*" expansion of 6 million files, it is
 > easiest to move the two files out of the way and pipe the "*" expansion
 > to xargs:
 > 
 > mkdir .keep
 > mv la.txt foo.sh .keep
 > echo * | xargs rm

If your shell expands "*" your ARG_MAX-complain should also apply to
the "echo"-binary in the line above ???

 > mv .keep/* .
 > rmdir .keep
 > 
 > If the shell can't handle this(*), you'd have to make e. g. a perl
 > script which does the necessary opendir()/readdir() itself and erases
 > the files.
 > 
 > (*) I did not want to try it with 6 million files. But then, it is
 > unwise to put so many files into one directory anyway.
 > 

Thanks for the lesson.

Malte.

 > -- 
 > Juergen Nickelsen <ni@tellique.de>
 > Tellique Kommunikationstechnik GmbH
 > Gustav-Meyer-Allee 25, 13355 Berlin, Germany
 > Tel. +49 30 46307-552 / Fax +49 30 46307-579
 > 
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