Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 06:26:27 -0400 (EDT) From: Thomas David Rivers <rivers@dignus.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG, shawn@luke.cpl.net Subject: Re: deleted huge directory Message-ID: <199710231026.GAA07280@lakes.dignus.com>
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>
> 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.)
>
>
>
>
Ha! Been-there, Done-that!
You can try this:
echo *
[which won't do a sort or stat, but might hang because the shell
runs out of memory.]
Or, echo 1*
echo 2*
echo 3*
echo 4*
etc...
The, if that doesn't work:
echo 11*
echo 12*
echo 13*
echo 14*
...
echo 21*
echo 22*
- once you've narrowed this down; you can replace the 'echo' lines
that work with 'rm' lines.
Then... (phew) you can peck away at it until it's size becomes manageable.
- Dave Rivers -
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