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Author: Richy B.

Follow me on Mastodon at @rbairwell@mastodon.org.uk or just the posts on this blog by following @richyb@blog.rac.me.uk .

Argument list too long when using rm ?

August 6, 2006
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Ever needed to delete a lot (and I mean several thousand) files from a directory in Linux? Then you may have encountered the “Argument list too long” error message which occurs when using “rm *” on the folder. This problem occurs because the list of files exceeds the 128K buffer which the kernel uses to pass the list of files to rm .

So how to defeat this problem?

Simple, use:
find . -name "*" -print | xargs rm
or, if you just want to delete the files starting “unwantedMail”, then use:
find . -name "unwantedMail*" -print | xargs rm

Yes, I’m back!

August 5, 2006
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After nearly 1.5 years, I’m back blogging – this time with a WordPress driven blog.

Why did I stop blogging?

Well, mainly due to spam. The comment spam got to such a level that every time I wanted to blog, I had to spend the time deleting spam instead. This took the “fun” out of it as well.

Hopefully WordPress (with a large number of plugins) will help keep the spam under control unlike the old version of Movable Type I had installed.

For the record, when I logged into my MovableType blog, there were over 17,500 comments! After deleting all the spam, I was left with under 3,000 comments!

Techy: Spare hard drives for sale + Backup solution needed

March 6, 2005
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I’ve now got two spare hard drives “for sale” (for sale in quotes as I’ve got no idea what second hand hard drives are selling for) – perfect working order: I just had to replace the 120Gb and 40Gb drives with 2×20)Gb as I needed even more storage capacity. My main machine now has 3x200Gb HD’s in it (600Gb) and a 60Gb drive (that’s the machine’s original hard drive with Windows XP on it etc etc). Poor Zaphod is still powered down as it’s main boot hard drive (with RedHat Fedora OS on it) has failed and I’ve still got to hook a monitor to it to access it’s 400Gb RAID0 configuration and 200Gb additional drive.

Woh! That’s 1,200Gb (1.2 Tb) of “on demand live storage” I have. By June, I will definitely need to purchase some sort of backup solution – but has any body got any recommendations? I’m looking to have around 2Tb (2,000Gb) of on-demand storage by that time, so I’m looking for at least 3Tb backup space. DVDs and CDs just won’t cut it (given a DVD can store around 8Gb, I’ll need 375 DVDs and 5,000 CDs would just be silly).

So – anybody got any recommendations for a good 3Tb backup solution?

News: Leicester Road Traffic Accident

March 5, 2005
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There’s just been Road Traffic Accident outside my house, and from what I can tell a neighbour was driving down the hill getting ready to park whilst another car (possibly driven by a under-25 male: can’t confirm this though) came up the hill driving quite rapidly in a dark blue car.

When I tried to call 999, my phone kept cutting out (even though my computer is right next to my bedroom window and the accident happened just outside, there were already people on the scene by the time I looked out) – but after around 8 minutes, 3 fire-engines, 1 paramedic car , 1 ambulance and 1 police car arrived (all that I could see).

Apart from the two main vehicles (the dark blue one is a total write off as it “flipped over” onto its roof), one other vehicle was slightly damaged on the side.

Murphy’s law dictated that my main camera was out of batteries and I didn’t find any more until the fire bridge had nearly finished right-siding the car (they are just cleaning the road as I type): but pictures are in the main entry below.

Continue ReadingNews: Leicester Road Traffic Accident

Personal: Holiday Photos Now Available

February 27, 2005
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As some of you may be aware, in September last year, I treated myself to a 16 day holiday in Tokyo, Japan. I’ve just got round to uploading around 340 photos (230Mb!) to http://japan04.rac.me.uk/ for viewing. Pictures are variable in quality and most don’t have descriptions at the moment (I’ll try and add them later on).

You’ll notice that the pictures start on “Day 5” – this is because when I went to Japan, I took my little Kodak EZ-200 camera with me: but by day 5 I had filled it up. However, whilst I had the cables and my laptop with me – I forgot to bring the drivers for the camera so I couldn’t download the photos! I had to buy a quite nice Ricoh Caplio RX 3.2Megapixels camera and use that. But when I got back to the UK, I found out the Kodak camera managed to somehow get corrupted! So the first 5 days photos of my first “own” holiday are now lost! It’s a double shame as on Day 2, I had a tour around Tokyo and took lots of good pictures 🙁