Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 10:26:40 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Palle Girgensohn <girgen@partitur.se> Cc: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@futuresouth.com>, Shawn Ramsey <shawn@luke.cpl.net>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: deleted huge directory Message-ID: <19971024102640.31032@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <344F4D1C.802DE3FC@partitur.se>; from Palle Girgensohn on Thu, Oct 23, 1997 at 03:11:56PM %2B0200 References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971023005911.29151B-100000@shell.futuresouth.com> <344F4D1C.802DE3FC@partitur.se>
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On Thu, Oct 23, 1997 at 03:11:56PM +0200, Palle Girgensohn wrote: > Matthew D. Fuller wrote: >> >> On Wed, 22 Oct 1997, Shawn Ramsey wrote: >> >>> Does anyone have any suggestions for deleting a huge directory? The >>> direcory is /var/news/spool/control/cancel. The directory is too large to >>> even do a ls. If I try doing ls, it eats up all the avail. RAM(140+mb) and >>> hangs. Anyone? I would try a wildcard, but I don't know what the filenames >>> are. (This is a very large news server, and this directory has never been >>> touch as far as I know.) >> >> Dear god. >> If you don't mind, I'll just borrow all that space..... >> Can you get a file listing by echo * > /place/some/file.list ? >> >> *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* >>> FreeBSD; the way computers were meant to be | >> * "The only reason I'm burning my candle at both ends, is * >>> that I haven't figured out how to light the middle yet."| >> * fullermd@futuresouth.com :-} MAtthew Fuller * >>> http://keystone.westminster.edu/~fullermd | >> *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-* > > > maybe > > find dirpath -exec rm {} \; > > will do it? just a wild guess... It would work, but it spawns an rm process for every file. This would make it *very* slow. By contrast, # find dirpath | xargs rm collects as many file names as will fit on a line (typically in the order of 5000), and passes them to a single rm process. Then it repeats for the next line full. Greg
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