'rm' Can not delete files

[Jerry McAllister]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 10:34:20AM -0500, Henry Olyer wrote:

> So what do I change if I want to increase the shell's file limit?

You don't want to diddle the shell. 
Use the correct UNIX utilities such as - for, xargs or find - in this 
case as have been suggested by other responders.   That is the way it
is done (and done better) in UNIX.

> 
> I use bash 4.

OK.  So??

> I never learned a shell language.  I suppose no one is as dumb as someone
> who choose's not to learn, so, what's the right one.  csh?, because I do a
> lot of scientific work?, or should I be looking at another?
> 

Probably doesn't matter that much what type of work you are
doing.  It matters more what the users of a system tend to use.

In FreeBSD it is  tcsh  which is basically an extension of csh.
Actually, nowdays on FreeBSD, csh is just a link to tcsh anyway.

On Lunix, I think most people use bash, so if you are there, do that.

There are some small differences that are meaningful depending on 
what kind of scripting you are doing.   But, mostly it doesn't matter
a lot.

////jerry    

> 
> 
> On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 10:25 PM, andrew clarke <mail at ozzmosis.com> wrote:
> 
> > On Tue 2012-02-07 23:17:16 UTC+0000, RW (rwmaillists at googlemail.com)
> > wrote:
> >
> > > On Tue, 07 Feb 2012 22:14:56 +0000
> > > Matthew Seaman wrote:
> > >
> > > > ls -1 | xargs rm
> > >
> > > but be aware that that wont work for filenames with spaces.
> >
> > In addition, I don't believe it solves the OP's initial problem of the
> > argument list being too long!  You'd probably need to use the xargs -n
> > switch here.
> >
> > The above will also try to 'rm' directories, which won't work.
> >
> > Instead I would use 'find':
> >
> > find . -type f -depth 1 -delete
> >
> > This will also work with filenames with spaces.
> >
> > Or the scenic route, using xargs, with one rm per file (slower):
> >
> > find . -type f -depth 1 -print0 | xargs -n1 -0 rm -f
> >
> > (The "scenic route" is useful if you want to do something else with
> > the files instead of deleting them with rm.)
> >
> > Regards
> > Andrew
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