req: New feature to rm? Remove file by the inode number

[John-Mark Gurney]

Julien Gabel wrote this message on Thu, May 05, 2005 at 18:55 +0200:
> >> Point 2, likely as not, might explain why there's no
> >> simple mechanism for doing this from rm. At the very
> >> least you'd have to specify the file system you're
> >> referring to, and many "plain" users couldn't do
> >> that safely. Those that can are probably able to use
> >> find anyway.
> 
> > A (device no, inode no) can uniquely identify a file
> > -but then it requires the same amt of traversals (from
> > the root directory's inode) that any other utility
> > does. Im not sure rm can optimize anything that a find
> > .. -exec rm {} \; would.
> 
> Or "find [...] -print | xargs \rm" to bypass some problem
> with a very long list of files to delete.

Please make that:
find [...] -print0 | xargs -0 rm
otherwise whitespace characters can cause problems... of course find
does have the -delete option which makes such mangling unnecessary..

-- 
  John-Mark Gurney				Voice: +1 415 225 5579

     "All that I will do, has been done, All that I have, has not."