rm command

[viks]

dear all..i have my /tmp file system which has plenty of small files.so while rebooting the cleanup of /tmp doesnt happen.when i manually give rm * , it give parameter is too long.how do i delete the files in /tmp.now i have to manually delete a set of matching files using *..like abc*.* and so on.somewhere i found thati have to set mode=clean.even this didnt workout..any experience on this ...thanks in advance to all

[Deepak Extross]

see man xargs.
There are some examples given there.

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

Your problem stems from only being able
to remove 256 files in one go.

My workaround, to remove files more than
three days old:

# find /tmp -mtime +3 -print | xargs rm

There is a kernel limit for this, I'll try
to find what you can do to fix this problem.

Michael

[Deepak Extross]

Hi again,
Here's the syntax you need:
ls | xargs -p -l | xargs rm -i

Hope this helps.

Just be sure of what you want to delete before you do this!

[Tom Geudens]

Hi,
Well, you can make this very complicated, but the following script is the easiest form :
#!/usr/bin/sh
for vFile in $(ls *abc*)
do
rm -i $vFile
done

Save the script, chmod 775 script, cd to /tmp
and execute the script.
Replace the "ls *abc*" with the command you want. If you're sure it works, remove the "-i" option from the rm command.

Regards,
Tom Geudens

[S.K. Chan]

Change the kernel parameter "large_ncargs_enabled" to 1 (ie: enable it). That will increase your limit. You can use SAM to change it or command line method .. as such ..

# cd /stand/build

# /usr/lbin/sysadm/system_prep -s system
==> creates an editable kernel file
# vi system
==> add this line ..
large_ncargs_enabled 1
# /usr/sbin/mk_kernel -s ./system
==> creates the test kernel "vmunix_test"
# mv /stand/system /stand/system.prev
# mv /stand/vmunix /stand/vmunix.prev
# mv /stand/build/system /stand/system
# mv /stand/build/vmunix_test /stand/vmunix
# shutdown -ry 0

[Steven Sim Kok Leong]

Hi,

# cd /tmp/test
# for i in `ls`;do rm -f $i;done

Tested it works where rm * failed.

Hope this helps. Regards.

Steven Sim Kok Leong

[Justo Exposito]

Hi,

Try this,

for i in ls
do
rm $i
done

Very simple...

Hope this help,

Justo.

[Carlos Fernandez Riera]

If you want to remove all files from /tmp....

Why not use:

umount /tmp
newfs /dev/vg00/rlvolxxx
mount /tmp


faster, cleaner, and ... excessive?

[Nico van Royen]

One other option.. just one word of caution.. be sure to be where you are in the filesystem.. (as always, when using root)...

root@tm4xm1a> ll | wc
6160 55433 548164
root@tm4xm1a> pwd
/var/tmos/logs/tap/eadir/fs/ANTKPN1A
root@tm4xm1a> date;find . -exec rm -f {} \; ; date
Thu Apr 18 13:49:02 METDST 2002
rm: cannot remove .. or .
Thu Apr 18 13:50:08 METDST 2002
root@tm4xm1a> ll | wc
1 2 8
root@tm4xm1a>

You might want to leave out the date commands... these was just there to see how long it would take to erase the 6160 files present.