Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2006 11:44:47 +0100
From: Owen Rees <owen.rees@hp.com>
To: cygwin@cygwin.com
Subject: Re: find missing parameter
Message-ID: <9BEEDDBA7B29B781CF02BF69@rees-o-3.labs.hpl.hp.com>
In-Reply-To: <44A4F211.F8B11DC1@dessent.net>
References: <5116344.post@talk.nabble.com> <44A4F211.F8B11DC1@dessent.net>
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--On 30 June 2006 02:42 -0700 Brian Dessent wrote:

> First, -exec is a bad way to do this.  It will have to fork/exec a copy
> of rm once for each file to be deleted, which is extraordinarily slow
> under Cygwin.  Use xargs instead:
>
> find . -name db\* -mtime +2 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
>
> This will result in rm being called only once with all the filenames to
> delete as arguments (unless the total length is too great to fit on one
> command line, in which case rm will be called as many times as
> necessary, but still much less than once per file.)

Provided that your version of cygwin (specifically findutils) is reasonable 
recent, you can use

find  . -name "db*" -mtime +2 -type f -exec /bin/rm {} +

to do more or less the same as with xargs.

-- 
Owen Rees
Hewlett Packard Laboratories, Bristol, UK


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