[SOLVED] RAR created 110,548 files in my ~./ !!!!!!

[panayk]

$ seq 1 110548 | sed 's/^/ncaaplaybook.part./' | xargs touch
$ time bash -c 'find ~ -name "ncaaplaybook.part.*" | xargs -n 100 rm'

real	1m18.067s
user	0m0.772s
sys	0m5.012s

$ seq 1 110548 | sed 's/^/ncaaplaybook.part./' | xargs touch
$ time bash -c 'find ~ -name "ncaaplaybook.part.*" | xargs rm'

real	1m14.515s
user	0m0.376s
sys	0m3.620s

$ seq 1 110548 | sed 's/^/ncaaplaybook.part./' | xargs touch
$ time bash -c 'ls ncaaplaybook.part.* | xargs rm'
bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long
rm: missing operand
Try `rm --help' for more information.

real	0m7.987s
user	0m3.664s
sys	0m0.284s

So it seems globbing doesn't work for this many arguments.

[mssever]

A couple notes: First, you should never parse the output of ls. It's human-readable, but it's not designed to be machine-parseable, and it can sometimes do the wrong thing.

Try this:

for i in ncaaplaybook.part*; do
  rm -f "$i"
done

You can't list that many files on the command line, but you can loop over them. This script considers them all one at a time, so it might not be the fastest, but it's guaranteed to work.

[panayk]

A couple notes: First, you should never parse the output of ls. It's human-readable, but it's not designed to be machine-parseable, and it can sometimes do the wrong thing.

Agreed, the safest thing to do, if possible, is something like:

find path expression -print0 | xargs -0 command

[mssever]

Agreed, the safest thing to do, if possible, is something like:

find path expression -print0 | xargs -0 command

Yes, but I should point out that shell globbing (such as in the for loop I gave) is equally safe. However, a properly-crafted find command is more efficient. I'm just too lazy to learn the ins and outs of find.

[linuxisevolution]

Yes, but I should point out that shell globbing (such as in the for loop I gave) is equally safe. However, a properly-crafted find command is more efficient. I'm just too lazy to learn the ins and outs of find.

Thanks guys i fixed it! i used the find command and used xargs+rm to delete the results. rm was giving an error becuase i had already deleted the files! please respond to my other post. thanks you guys for your help