My FreeBSD VM with its 10GB virtual hard disk ran out of space today. The primary culprit was /var/spool/clientmqueue consuming nearly 3GB of space:

# du -d 1 /var/spool/
8	/var/spool/output
4	/var/spool/opielocks
2955904	/var/spool/clientmqueue
4	/var/spool/dma
4	/var/spool/lpd
4	/var/spool/lock
4	/var/spool/mqueue
2955936	/var/spool/

But when trying to just delete the files, I got “argument list too long”:

# rm -f /var/spool/clientmqueue/*
/bin/rm: Argument list too long.

In the Google search I learned something interesting: find has a -delete option. This worked well:

# find /var/spool/clientmqueue -name '*' -delete