too many arguments while deleting files in linux.

for reasons that i’ll keep to myself, i needed to delete thousands of files on a linux box.  so many files, in fact, that rm -Rf *.mp3 returned a “too many arguments” response.  first time I’ve ever seen such a thing.

turns out that there’s a maximum number of arguments that can be passed to rm.

solution: find . -name “*.mp3″ | xargs rm -Rf

there is something very very satisfying about the pipe command.