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Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 15:11:56 +0200
From: Palle Girgensohn <girgen@partitur.se>
Organization: Partitur
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To: "Matthew D. Fuller" <fullermd@futuresouth.com>
CC: Shawn Ramsey <shawn@luke.cpl.net>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: deleted huge directory
References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971023005911.29151B-100000@shell.futuresouth.com>
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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...

/palle