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Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
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14 years ago

Too many filename matches

Hello, I got a system that records to a Compact Flash disk. Everything works great except when I try to delete a bunch of files using rm *.dat. It gives me the message: "Too many filename ...
Altera_Forum's avatar
Altera_Forum
Icon for Honored Contributor rankHonored Contributor
14 years ago

The usual way to avoid the argument limit is using 'xargs', typically: 

find . -name '*.dat' | xargs rm
although in your case: 

echo *.dat | xargs rm
may well work, but I'm not sure busybox has xargs.

You could so something like (untested): 

rm_all()
{
    while 
    do
        rm "$1" "$2" "$3" "$4" "$5" "$6" "$7" "$8" "$9"
        shift 9
    done
    rm "$@"
}
rm_all *.dat
Since it is likely that the shell function argument limit is larger than that for exec.