OS X Limitations: working around deletion of large numbers of files (time machine image)

I've run into problems like this, when I was unable to delete an OS X sparsebundle image on a Time Capsule.

I think I was able to use rm -r, but in some cases event that might not work. This Mac OS X hints discussion has several fixes: Script to delete huge sparsebundle images.

They include:

• AppleScript invocation of rm -rv
• unix commands including use of bands, xargs, head, find and so on.

The article includes related references

• osx - OS X - argument list too long for rm -rf *, 4000 files - Super User
• Perl to the rescue: case study of deleting a large directory | Randal L. Schwartz [blogs.perl.org] (millions of files to delete - some good discussion there too)