Question

I’m trying to remove about one billion files located in a single directory under linux with this command:

# rm /test/*.mp3

but execution is fault with this message:

-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

how can i solve this problem?

Answer 1

I frequently use something of the form

find /test/ -name '*.mp3' -delete

This allows each file to be processed in turn, rather than a glob trying to list all the files as arguments to the rm command.