Deleting many files results in "argument list too long"

Question

I have 280 thousand photos to delete in a folder, but some videos to keep. In the folder, I gave the command: #rm *.jpg, but I get "argument list too long". When I create an argument to delete some of the photos, it works on a smaller set, like this: # rm 104-*.jpg.

How can I efficiently delete all the JPEG files in a directory without getting the message "Argument list too long"?

#rm -f *.jpg gives the same message.

Opening the folder in Caja uses too much memory and crashes. I am using Ubuntu MATE.

Answer 1

A typical way to handle the “argument list too long” error is via the find command:

find  -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -type f -name "*.jpg" -delete

Answer 2

You can use xargs:

printf '%s\0' *.jpg | xargs -0 rm --

In bash, the printf command is a built-in and is not subject to the same argument length limitations.