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Re: How to use Procmail to remove messages from server after x number of days

2011-03-03 03:58:52

Date: Tue, 01 Mar 2011 16:35:59 -0500
From: Richard Ball <rgball(_at_)ellerbach(_dot_)com>
To: procmail(_at_)lists(_dot_)RWTH-Aachen(_dot_)de
Subject: Re: How to use Procmail to remove messages from server after x number
      of days

On 1-3-2011 16:31, LuKreme wrote:

[[..  sneck  ..]

-exec rm {} \; is simply a long way of spawning a shell and executing 
rm for old, OLD versions of find that don't have -delete.


Which will break if too many files are found. (where "too many" means the 
length of the string of filenames exceeds the buffer length allocated for 
commands on the system).

"Not exactly" --  to put it politely.

A find(1) "-exec ..' clause is executed for _each_ matching file that 
find(1) finds.  '{}" is replaced by the filename, _singular_, that was 
just found to mamtch.

In the days before things like xargs(1),
   'find -name {{pattern}} -exec rm {} \;'
was a =standard= way of getting around a 'line too long' error from 
   'rm {{pattenr}}'


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