[Nottingham] saved by the shell ?

[Roger Light]

On Tue, May 20, 2008 at 06:21:46PM +0000, Martin Kirk wrote:

> after a bit of googling i figure i need something along the lines of :-
> 	grep "My Subject Line" ./* | xargs rm
> but i'm getting an error "bin/grep: Argument list too long"

I think the other solutions provided will fail for exactly the same
reason.

How about

grep -rl "My Subject Line" /path/to/maildir | xargs rm

Note that even if your argument list was short enough for grep as
you show, you'd still want the "-l" argument to grep.

Cheers,

Roger