Re: newbie - questions about "rm"

dave8421@xxxxxxxxxxx enlightened us with:
I've read that 'xargs' should be used with 'rm' when using a list of
files too large for 'rm' to process.

Mostly it's a limit of the shell.

I'm wondering why 'rm' doesn't just accept a list of files as a
command line argument,

It does. However, if you have a directory with 1000000 files in it,
you can't just do "rm *" do delete them all. xargs will take the
filenames from stdin and feeds them to the "rm" command in bite-size
chunks.

Also, if the output is redirected from another command, is there a
lot of overhead using a program like xargs, since it is calling the
program multiple times?

That depends on the program that's being called multiple times. I
wouldn't worry about it until you notice it becoming a problem.

Sybren
--
Sybren Stüvel
Stüvel IT - http://www.stuvel.eu/
.

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