The rm program (as well as many other utilities) is limited by the number of file it can delete due to the limited size of the os command line. This prevents a lot of elegant solutions in high level tools. For instance, I am using a building tool (make replacement) called "cook" which is excellent. I work on a project with 2500 source files (and 2500 objects). I want to be able to just say: rm "file1.o file2.o ... file2500.o" but this is impossible and make me sad. What I did is to write a program which receives the list of files from stdin (or a file) which is limitless, and call rm to remove them. I think this should be a feature of rm. An idea about command line usage could be: rm --file file.txt and the interpretation would be that rm will read the "file.txt" file and remove all files which are specified in it... The format of file.txt could be the cause of a few more options to rm...:) Regarding redirection of this bug: Since the GNU people are responsible for "rm" you probably need to mail this to them (I couldnt find a place in their site for reporting bugs...) Mark.
see the man page for 'xargs'. It was specifically designed for handling this sort of case.