Argument list too long error for rm cp mv commands

Question

I have several hundred PDFs under a directory in UNIX  The names of the PDFs are really long  approx  60 chars    When I try to delete all PDFs together using the following command   rm -f   pdf   I get the following error    bin rm  cannot execute  Argument list too long    What is the solution to this error  Does this error occur for mv and cp commands as well  If yes  how to solve for these commands

User · Accepted Answer

The reason this occurs is because bash actually expands the asterisk to every matching file, producing a very long command line.

Try this:

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

Warning: this is a recursive search and will find (and delete) files in subdirectories as well. Tack on -f to the rm command only if you are sure you don't want confirmation.

You can do the following to make the command non-recursive:

find . -maxdepth 1 -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Another option is to use find's -delete flag:

find . -name "*.pdf" -delete

User · Answer

I ran into this problem a few times   Many of the solutions will run the rm command for each individual file that needs to be deleted  This is very inefficient   find   -name    pdf  -print0   xargs -0 rm -rf   I ended up writing a python script to delete the files based on the first 4 characters in the file-name   import os filedir     tmp    The directory you wish to run rm on  filelist    os listdir filedir    gets listing of all files in the specified dir newlist       Makes a blank list named newlist for i in filelist       if str  i   4   not in newlist   This makes sure that the elements are unique for newlist         newlist append  i   4    This takes only the first 4 charcters of the folder filename and appends it to newlist for i in newlist      if  tmp  in i    If statment to look for tmp in the filename dirname         print   Running command rm -rf   str filedir  str i       File Count    str len os listdir filedir      Prints the command to be run and a total file count         os system  rm -rf   str filedir  str i        Actual shell command print   DONE     This worked very well for me  I was able to clear out over 2 million temp files in a folder in about 15 minutes  I commented the tar out of the little bit of code so anyone with minimal to no python knowledge can manipulate this code

User · Answer

I have faced a similar problem when there were millions of useless log files created by an application which filled up all inodes  I resorted to  locate   got all the files  located d into a text file and then removed them one by one  Took a while but did the job

User · Answer

I m surprised there are no ulimit answers here   Every time I have this problem I end up here or here   I understand this solution has limitations but ulimit -s 65536 seems to often do the trick for me

User · Answer

find has a -delete action   find   -maxdepth 1 -name    pdf  -delete

User · Answer

I only know a way around this  The idea is to export that list of pdf files you have into a file  Then split that file into several parts  Then remove pdf files listed in each part   ls   grep  pdf  gt  list txt wc -l list txt   wc -l is to count how many line the list txt contains  When you have the idea of how long it is  you can decide to split it in half  forth or something  Using split -l command For example  split it in 600 lines each   split -l 600 list txt   this will create a few file named xaa xab xac and so on depends on how you split it  Now to  import  each list in those file into command rm  use this   rm    lt xaa  rm    lt xab  rm    lt xac    Sorry for my bad english

User · Answer

You can create a temp folder  move all the files and sub-folders you want to keep into the temp folder then delete the old folder and rename the temp folder to the old folder try this example until you are confident to do it live   mkdir testit cd testit mkdir big folder tmp folder touch big folder file1 pdf touch big folder file2 pdf mv big folder file1 pdf tmp folder  rm -r big folder mv tmp folder big folder   the rm -r big folder will remove all files in the big folder no matter how many  You just have to be super careful you first have all the files folders you want to keep  in this case it was file1 pdf

User · Answer

Another answer is to force xargs to process the commands in batches  For instance to delete the files 100 at a time  cd into the directory and run this   echo   pdf   xargs -n 100 rm

User · Answer

You could use a bash array   files    pdf  for  I 0 I lt    files     I  1000    do     rm -f    files    I 1000   done   This way it will erase in batches of 1000 files per step

User · Answer

If they are filenames with spaces or special characters  use   find -maxdepth 1 -name    pdf  -exec rm           This sentence search all files in the current directory  -maxdepth 1  with extension pdf  -name    pdf    and then  delete each one  -exec rm         The expression    replace the name of the file  and       set the filename as string  including spaces or special characters

User · Answer

i was facing same problem while copying form source directory to destination  source directory had files  3 lakcs  i used cp with option -r and it s worked for me  cp -r abc  def   it will copy all files from abc to def without giving warning of Argument list too long

User · Answer

tl dr  It s a kernel limitation on the size of the command line argument  Use a for loop instead   Origin of problem  This is a system issue  related to execve and ARG MAX constant  There is plenty of documentation about that  see man execve  debian s wiki     Basically  the expansion produce a command  with its parameters  that exceeds the ARG MAX limit  On kernel 2 6 23  the limit was set at 128 kB  This constant has been increased and you can get its value by executing   getconf ARG MAX   2097152   on 3 5 0-40-generic   Solution  Using for Loop  Use a for loop as it s recommended on BashFAQ 095 and there is no limit except for RAM memory space   Dry run to ascertain it will delete what you expect   for f in   pdf  do echo rm   f   done   And execute it   for f in   pdf  do rm   f   done   Also this is a portable approach as glob have strong and consistant behavior among shells  part of POSIX spec     Note  As noted by several comments  this is indeed slower but more maintainable as it can adapt more complex scenarios  e g  where one want to do more than just one action   Solution  Using find  If you insist  you can use find but really don t use xargs as it  is dangerous  broken  exploitable  etc   when reading non-NUL-delimited input    find   -maxdepth 1 -name    pdf  -delete    Using -maxdepth 1     -delete instead of -exec rm      allows find to simply execute the required system calls itself without using an external process  hence faster  thanks to  chepner comment    References   I m getting  Argument list too long   How can I process a large list in chunks    wooledge execve 2  - Linux man page  search for ARG MAX    Error  Argument list too long   Debian s wiki   Why do I get     bin sh  Argument list too long    when passing quoted arguments    SuperUser

User · Answer

Try this also If you wanna delete above 30 90 days     or else below 30 90 -  days files folders then you can use the below ex commands  Ex  For 90days excludes above after 90days files folders deletes  it means 91 92    100 days   find  lt path gt  -type f -mtime  90 -exec rm -rf         Ex  For only latest 30days files that you wanna delete then use the below command  -   find  lt path gt  -type f -mtime -30 -exec rm -rf         If you wanna giz the files for more than 2 days files  find  lt path gt  -type f -mtime  2 -exec gzip         If you wanna see the files folders only from past one month   Ex   find  lt path gt  -type f -mtime -30 -exec ls -lrt         Above 30days more only then list the files folders Ex   find  lt path gt  -type f -mtime  30 -exec ls -lrt        find  opt app logs -type f -mtime  30 -exec ls -lrt

User · Answer

To delete all   pdf in a directory  path to dir with pdf files   mkdir empty dir          Create temp empty dir  rsync -avh --delete --include    pdf  empty dir   path to dir with pdf files      To delete specific files via rsync using wildcard is probably the fastest solution in case you ve millions of files  And it will take care of error you re getting      Optional Step   DRY RUN  To check what will be deleted without deleting     rsync -avhn --delete --include    pdf  empty dir   path to dir with pdf files           Click rsync tips and tricks for more rsync hacks

User · Answer

What about a shorter and more reliable one  for i in      pdf  do rm  quot  i quot   done

User · Answer

I had the same problem with a folder full of temporary images that was growing day by day and this command helped me to clear the folder  find   -name    png  -mtime  50 -exec rm         The difference with the other commands is the mtime parameter that will take only the files older than X days  in the example 50 days   Using that multiple times  decreasing on every execution the day range  I was able to remove all the unnecessary files

User · Answer

I found that for extremely large lists of files   1e6   these answers were too slow  Here is a solution using parallel processing in python  I know  I know  this isn t linux    but nothing else here worked      This saved me hours     delete files import os as os import glob import multiprocessing as mp  directory   r your directory  os chdir directory    files names    i for i in glob glob        format  pdf        report errors from pool  def callback error result       print  error   result     delete file using system command def delete files file name        os system  rm -rf     file name   pool   mp Pool 12      or use pool   mp Pool mp cpu count      if   name         main         for file name in files names          print file name          pool apply async delete files  file name   error callback callback error

User · Answer

A bit safer version than using xargs  also not recursive   ls -p   grep -v         grep    pdf     while read file  do rm   file   done   Filtering our directories here is a bit unnecessary as  rm  won t delete it anyway  and it can be removed for simplicity  but why run something that will definitely return error

User · Answer

Using GNU parallel  sudo apt install parallel  is super easy  It runs the commands multithreaded where      is the argument passed  E g   ls  tmp myfiles    parallel  rm

User · Answer

you can use this commend   find -name    pdf   -delete

User · Answer

Argument list too long As this question title for cp  mv and rm  but answer stand mostly for rm  Un x commands Read carefully command s man page  For cp and mv  there is a -t switch  for target  find   -type f -name    pdf  -exec cp -ait  quot  path to target quot        and find   -type f -name    pdf  -exec mv -t  quot  path to target quot        Script way There is an overall workaroung used in bash script     bin bash  folder    quot  path to folder quot   quot  path to anther folder quot        quot  1 quot     quot --run quot     amp  amp  exec find  quot   target     quot  -type f -name    pdf  -exec  0       for file  do     printf  quot Doing something with   s   n quot   quot  file quot  done

User · Answer

The rm command has a limitation of files which you can remove simultaneous   One possibility you can remove them using multiple times the rm command bases on your file patterns  like   rm -f A  pdf rm -f B  pdf rm -f C  pdf     rm -f   pdf   You can also remove them through the find command   find   -name    pdf  -exec rm

User · Answer

you can try this  for f in   pdf do   rm  quot  f quot  done  EDIT  ThiefMaster comment suggest me not to disclose such dangerous practice to young shell s jedis  so I ll add a more  quot safer quot  version  for the sake of preserving things when someone has a  quot -rf     pdf quot  file  echo  quot   Whooooo quot   gt   tmp dummy sh for f in    pdf  do    echo  quot rm -i   quot  f  quot  quot  done  gt  gt   tmp dummy sh  After running the above  just open the  tmp dummy sh file in your favorite editor and check every single line for dangerous filenames  commenting them out if found  Then copy the dummy sh script in your working dir and run it  All this for security reasons

User · Answer

For remove first 100 files   rm -rf  ls   head -100

User · Answer

The below option seems simple to this problem  I got this info from some other thread but it helped me    for file in  usr op data Software temp application openpages-storage    do     cp   file   opt sw op-storage  done   Just run the above one command and it will do the task

User · Answer

And another one   cd   path to pdf printf   s 0     Pp  Dd  Ff    xargs -0 rm   printf is a shell builtin  and as far as I know it s always been as such  Now given that printf is not a shell command  but a builtin   it s not subject to  argument list too long      fatal error   So we can safely use it with shell globbing patterns such as    Pp  Dd  Ff   then we pipe its output to remove  rm  command  through xargs  which makes sure it fits enough file names in the command line so as not to fail the rm command  which is a shell command   The  0 in printf serves as a null separator for the file names wich are then processed by xargs command  using it  -0  as a separator  so rm does not fail when there are white spaces or other special characters in the file names

User · Answer

If you   re trying to delete a very large number of files at one time  I deleted a directory with 485 000  today   you will probably run into this error    bin rm  Argument list too long    The problem is that when you type something like rm -rf    the   is replaced with a list of every matching file  like    rm -rf file1 file2 file3 file4    and so on  There is a relatively small buffer of memory allocated to storing this list of arguments and if it is filled up  the shell will not execute the program   To get around this problem  a lot of people will use the find command to find every file and pass them one-by-one to the    rm    command like this   find   -type f -exec rm -v         My problem is that I needed to delete 500 000 files and it was taking way too long   I stumbled upon a much faster way of deleting files     the    find    command has a    -delete    flag built right in  Here   s what I ended up using   find   -type f -delete   Using this method  I was deleting files at a rate of about 2000 files second     much faster   You can also show the filenames as you   re deleting them   find   -type f -print -delete      or even show how many files will be deleted  then time how long it takes to delete them   root devel  ls -1   wc -l  amp  amp  time find   -type f -delete 100000 real    0m3 660s user    0m0 036s sys     0m0 552s

User · Answer

Or you can try   find   -name    pdf  -exec rm -f

[linux] Argument list too long error for rm, cp, mv commands

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