rm command - Argument List too long

Some days back I had problems deleting n no of files in folder.

while using rm command it would say

$rm -f /home/sriram/tmp/*.txt
-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

This is not a limitation of the rm command, but a kernel limitation on the size of the parameters of the command. Since I was performing shell globbing (selecting all the files with extension .txt), this meant that the size of the command line arguments became bigger with the number of the files.

One solution is to to either run rm command inside a loop and delete each individual result, or to use find with the xargs parameter to pass the delete command. I prefer the find solution so I had changed the rm line inside the script to:

find /home/$u/tmp/ -name '*.txt' -print0 xargs -0 rm

this does the trick and solves the problem. One final touch was to not receive warnings if there were no actual files to delete, like:

rm: too few arguments

Try `rm --help' for more information.

For this I have added the -f parameter to rm (-f, –force = ignore nonexistent files, never prompt). Since this was running in a shell script from cron the prompt was not needed also so no problem here. The final line I used to replace the rm one was:

find /home/$u/tmp/ -name '*.txt' -print0 xargs -0 rm -f

You can also do this in the directory:
ls xargs rm

Alternatively you could have used a one line find:

find /home/$u/tmp/ -name ‘*.txt’ -exec rm {} \; -print


Thanks to him