Argument receiving error for rm command

0 votes

I have several hundred PDFs under a directory in UNIX. The names of the PDFs are approx. 60 chars.

When I try to remove them all together using rm -f *.pdf

I get the following error:

/bin/rm: cannot execute [Argument list too long]

What can I do?

Jun 7, 2019 in Linux Administration by Upasana
• 8,620 points
713 views

1 answer to this question.

0 votes

Bash actually expands the asterisk to every matching file, producing a very long command line. That's the reason for your issue.

find . -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

This should help

answered Jun 8, 2019 by Shubham
• 13,490 points

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