Argument list too long error for rm, cp, mv commands?

Question

I have several hundred PDFs under a directory in UNIX. The names of the PDFs are really long (approx. 60 chars). When I try to delete all PDFs together using the following command: rm -f *.pdf I get the following error: /bin/rm: cannot execute [Argument list too long] What is the solution to this error? Does this error occur for `mv` and `cp` commands as well? If yes, how to solve for these commands?

Answer 1

For rm - you can use find and delete.

find /source/directory -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -name "*.pdf" -delete

For mv and cp you can use find and exec

find /source/directory -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -name '*.pdf' -exec mv {} /target/directory \;

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

You can try

echo *.pdf | xargs rm -f