find command

[Peter J. Palmquist]

Hi,

When executing the find command as in the example below, the command appears to terminate prematurely. At times, depending on what I am searching for I do get some returns, but inevitably the command terminates the same way without completely searching the directory hierarchy.

Does anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance!
Peter

EXAMPLE:

ns01# find . -name "*.mpeg" -exec rm -i {} ;
find: cannot open .: Value too large for defined data type
ns01#

[Kofi ARTHIABAH]

Do you have a "hidden" directory there somewhere? (eg. one with say space for a name?)

[CHRIS_ANORUO · Accepted solution]

Your comand is okay. If the kernel parameters for maxssiz, maxtsiz and maxdsiz are default sizes as at when system was installed, pls increase them.

[James R. Ferguson]

Peter:

This is common if there are a large number of arguments. You can avoid this by using xargs in place of exec. This is actually "kinder" on system resources. Do something like:

# find . -name "*.mpeg"|xargs -n100 rm -i {}

This will do 100 files at a time until the list is exhausted.

See the man pages for xargs.

...JRF...

[Trevor Dyson]

Peter,

Just working on a hunch, are any of the *.mpeg files greater then 2GB in size?

[Scott Dunkley]

how many mpeg files are there, there may be too many to pass to the wild card, in whcih case write a simple loop to pick up the files.

[Peter J. Palmquist]

Hi All,

Thanks a bunch for all your help! Chris & James the comments you made helped me isolate the problem. The homes which I had to clean reside on a Network Appliance, and are mounted to an Intel Box running Solaris. When I instead mounted the Network Appliance to my HP B2000 running HP-UX 11.0, I was able to perform my searches without any problems at all. The comments about the kernal perameters are what clued me in to making this change. Thanks again!

Peter