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:1)

          by dlc (50) <reversethis-{gro.toorneves} {ta} {cld}> on 2003.04.09 10:47 (#18938) Homepage Journal

          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)

          Reply to This

          Parent