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/bin/rm: Argument list too long.

Have you ever encountered this particular messages? don't know what to do with it? I used to get this a lot on some of the freeBSD server that I maintain, mostly cause when I try to delete the sendmail queue's, my sendmail realy like to fill up the /var/spool partition :p so from time to time I have to delete it manually, but the thing is the folder contain to many files when I try to rm -fr * nasty "/bin/rm: Argument list too long." show up. Well the solution is fairly simple (for me that is) for me just use some shell script magic:

1st I make sure I'm in the /var/spool/mqueue, so we don't want accidentally delete the / partition don't we?, trust me I happen to me once good thing I run it on my VMware machine if not I' totally fsck :p. So back to our folder /var/spool/mqueue that is, I just issued this single line of shell script:

for x in *; do rm -vfr $x; done

and all the thousand files in /var/spool/mqueue is gone! there some other way to delete multiple files here a good example how with a different approach :

find . -name '*' | xargs rm

where "." is the current directory the command is being run

-EOF