/bin/rm lots of files

[Reini Urban]

Lester Ingber schrieb:
> I couldn't find what I thought I recalled as a similar posting.
> In my Makefile I have a command to remove a directory of files.
> I get a complaint that there are too many files to remove (about 1000).
> How do I change the default for increasing the number of listed/open files?

You don't.
cygwin is not better that most other POSIX system, even if it's on MS 
Windows. This limitation is based on the maximum length of arguments for 
a new process, usually getconf ARG_MAX

 >The maximum is depending on the system/kernel and ranging
 >from 4096 bytes (POSIX) to about a megabyte on some systems.
 >On some systems, you're more likely to run into this limit,
 >e.g., HP-UX 10 and IRIX 6 (20478 bytes) or AIX 4 (24576 bytes).

On unix you would do it with xargs for example, or find -exec rm \{\},
on cygwin also.

$ man xargs
$ ls --color=none|xargs /bin/rm

http://216.239.51.104/search?q=cache:W-J38vNyuV4J:dbforums.com/arch/144/2002/10/514976+bash+commandline+length+limitation&hl=en

-- 
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/home/rurban/


--
Unsubscribe info:      http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
Problem reports:       http://cygwin.com/problems.html
Documentation:         http://cygwin.com/docs.html
FAQ:                   http://cygwin.com/faq/