Argument receiving error for rm command

Question

I have several hundred PDFs under a directory in UNIX. The names of the PDFs are approx. 60 chars.

When I try to remove them all together using rm -f *.pdf

I get the following error:

/bin/rm: cannot execute [Argument list too long]

What can I do?

Answer 1

Bash actually expands the asterisk to every matching file, producing a very long command line. That's the reason for your issue.

find . -name "*.pdf" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

This should help