[SOLVED] Easiest way to mass delete files without crasing server?

guessity · 01-18-2010, 01:48 AM

I have like over 60 gb of tons and tons of tiny tiny files.

I used

Code:

rm -rf *

and I ended with system load of over 100+.

Any idea how do I mass remove the files without crashing the system? I have Q9550 with 8 gb ram.

kirukan · 01-18-2010, 02:09 AM

So remove by date, user, size or name this may give you the chances to remove the whole files step by step.

AutoBot · 01-18-2010, 02:27 AM

To my knowledge there is no good way to get around this. If this is going to be a continuous problem then I would use reiserfs on a separate partition for these files...reiserfs is good with many small files.

There are benchmarks around for deletion time for lots of files on different filesystems.

jschiwal · 01-18-2010, 04:01 AM

Part of the problem is that the asterisk expands to all of the files in the current directory. The filenames are also sorted before being added as command line arguments.

You could run:
find . -type f -delete
find . -type d -empty -delete
find . -type d -exec rm -r '{}'

The second line could be run repeatedly instead. The third line could be run instead of the second line.