xargs no longer baffles me

[jbanana]

In bash, I want to delete a lot of files. Easy enough:

rm somepath/prefix*.txt

But I get "Argument list too long" because there are a *lot* of files. Well, I know I can use find like this:

find somepath -name "prefix*.txt" -exec rm '{}' \;

but that removes the files one at a time, and there are thousands of them so it's inefficient (and I'm impatient).

Solution:

find somepath -name "prefix*.txt" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Nice - the output from find is collected up by xargs until it has a nice big list but not too big and then it executes rm on that list, and repeats until none left.

Now I can't see what was baffling me.