Argument list too long error for rm, cp, mv commands

Question

I have several hundred PDFs under a directory in UNIX. The names of the PDFs are really long (approx. 60 chars).

When I try to delete all PDFs together using the fol

Answer 1

A bit safer version than using xargs, also not recursive: ls -p | grep -v '/$' | grep '\.pdf$' | while read file; do rm "$file"; done

Filtering our directories here is a bit unnecessary as 'rm' won't delete it anyway, and it can be removed for simplicity, but why run something that will definitely return error?