Month: August 2014

While you are deleting some files which fill up your disk you may hit -bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long error message.

So you can use below syntax to can delete those files:
# find . -name "DIR_PATH/*" -type f -exec rm -f {} \;
or:
# find DIR_PATH -name "*" -type f -exec rm -f {} \;

You can also delete files with a specific extension (ex.: .php):
# find DIR_PATH -name "*.php" -type f -exec rm -f {} \;
or:
# find . -name "DIR_PATH/*.php" -type f -exec rm -f {} \;

PS: In our case DIR_PATH=/var/spool/postfix/maildrop (there are like a half million files in that directory).

For some reason df -h command shows that you have plenty of free space. However your apps keep telling you that you don’t have enough free space. The following will help you identify the problem.

The –inodes option to df will tell you how many inodes are reserved for use. For example:
df --inodes /
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/root
989296 977987 11309 99% /
find / -xdev -print | wc -l
859714

Notice that the number of entries returned from find is lower than IUsed for the root (/) filesystem.

Remember that directories, symlinks, UNIX domain sockets and named pipes are all ‘files’ as it relates to the filesystem. So using find -type f flag is wildly inaccurate, from a statistical viewpoint.

If you have two files and one of the files needs to have the same permissions as the other just use the following command:
chmod --reference targetfile sourcefile