use Perl

• xargs is your friend (Score:2, Informative)

  by dlc (50)

  $ echo * | xargs rm

  --
  (darren)
  • Re:xargs is your friend (Score:2)

    by pudge (1)

    Yeah, you probably use sed too! :)
    • Re:xargs is your friend (Score:2, Informative)

      by jmm (276)

      xargs is especially useful with find - it lets you run a command (like rm) on large numbers of files at a time, but breaking them up so it is not too many at a time. (Using -exec from find runs a separate command for each file found, which can be very slow for a large/deep file tree.)
      • Re:xargs is your friend (Score:3, Interesting)

        by pudge (1)

        Yeah, I use xargs quite a bit, esp. with find ... however, I didn't think about using echo *. An ls took forever, I don't know how long echo * would take. readdir was surprisingly, relatively, fast.
        • Re:xargs is your friend (Score:2)

          by belg4mit (967)

          ls -1 is better than echo *,
          because your shell still has
          to do the globbing for the latter...
          and you may lose

          --
          Were that I say, pancakes?
          • Re:xargs is your friend (Score:2)

            by pudge (1)

            That's sorta what I figured ... I don't know if the shell could have handled echo *. And again, ls took forever. Stoopid Unix!
            • Re:xargs is your friend (Score:2)

              by belg4mit (967)

              Doh! I missed that the first time through.
              ls shouldn't be slow though. Stoopid MacBSD? :-P
              Of course it depends on the filesystem,
              it's not advisable for many to have single
              directories with so many files. It might have
              been quicker to remove the directory and
              recreate it afterwards ;-)

              --
              Were that I say, pancakes?
              • Re:xargs is your friend (Score:3, Informative)

                by jmm (276)

                ls -f has been around since version 7 days, back when men were men and computers were slow. The -f option tells ls to use the order that it finds entries in the directory - which means that there is no time required to sort the entries before displaying them. With a really large number of entries in a directory, that sort could take a while (especially when Unix was running on a PDP-11).
        • Re:xargs is your friend (Score:1)

          by dlc (50)

          ls sorts the entries in the directory, while echo does not, which means ls will always be slower for large directories. echo * | xargs rm is simply the shell's glob operator, which is most likely implemented using readdir.

          --
          (darren)
      • Re:xargs is your friend (Score:2)

        by jdavidb (1361)

        My understanding is that only works for GNU xargs, though.

        Of course, who would want to use a proprietary xargs?

        --
        J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers