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To: "David =?iso-8859-1?q?G=F3mez?=" <david@pleyades.net>
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Subject: Re: Argument list
References: <20021001195417.GA13192@fargo>
From: Jason Price <jprice@cyberbuzz.gatech.edu>
Date: 01 Oct 2002 16:14:33 -0400
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"David Gómez" <david@pleyades.net> writes:

> I created a directory with 100000 files to test the new htree patch
> for the ext3 filesystem, and found a bug when I tried to remove all
> the files.  The command 'rm *' gave the error 'zsh: argument list too
> long'. If expansion doesn't support so many parameters, what it's the
> supossed way to remove all these files without deleting the directory?

This is actually an OS limit rather than a zsh limit.  IIRC, zsh
dynamically alocates space for arguments as needed.  However, the OS
usually has a hard limit set somewhere.

ls | xargs rm

though there's probably a cleaner way.  Season the 'ls' command to
taste.

Jason