Shell – Find command – argument list too long

findshell-script

Oracle Linux 5.10
BASH shell

[oracle@src01]$ getconf ARG_MAX
131072

[oracle@srv01]$ ls -1 | wc -l
40496

#!/bin/bash
#
# delete files in /imr_report_repo that are older than 15-days
find /imr_report_repo/* -maxdepth 0 -type f -mtime +15 |
while read file
do
    rm -f $file 
done

/usr/bin/find: Argument list too long

If I'm reading this right the maximum arguments allowed is 131,072 and I only have 40,496 files in this directory. I haven't checked, but I'm probably trying to delete 40,000 files (over 2-weeks old).

Best Answer

I think this has been answered here:

https://arstechnica.com/civis/viewtopic.php?t=1136262

The shell is doing a file expansion of /imr_report_repo/* , which causes the problem. I had a similar issue which I fixed by changing the find command from

find /imr_report_repo/* -maxdepth 0 -type f -mtime +15

to 

find /imr_report_repo/ -name "*" -maxdepth 0 -type f -mtime +15

The quotes keep the shell from expanding the wildcard and then find can use it as a regular expression. It also helps if you need to search for a large number of files that match a specific criteria (like "*.foo").

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