On Sat, 13 Sep 1997, David Brownlee wrote:

> 	'tar tzf packagefile.gz | xargs rm'
> 
> 	Will probably still leave directories, but thats fine :)
> 

On most UNIX systems that will fail because you will get a command line 
way too big (assuming a large number of files, as in the base121). I dont
remember trying it on NetBSD but I assume its the same.

You need to iterate instead of removing all at once. I dont know much csh
but here's how I would do it in ksh or bash:

  tar tzf base.tgz | while read; do rm $REPLY ; done

If you have perl it's even better to do something like:

  tar tzf base.tgz | perl -n -e 'chop; unlink($_)'

because you dont spawn a new process for each file you remove. The same   
process calls the unlink system call several times.

Good luck.

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