Date: Thu, 23 Oct 1997 18:40:59 +0930 From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> To: Gordon Henderson <gordon@drogon.net> Cc: Shawn Ramsey <shawn@luke.cpl.net>, questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: deleted huge directory Message-ID: <19971023184059.53521@lemis.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.3.95.971023095452.14037D-100000@unicorn>; from Gordon Henderson on Thu, Oct 23, 1997 at 10:01:46AM %2B0100 References: <19971023181950.01356@lemis.com> <Pine.LNX.3.95.971023095452.14037D-100000@unicorn>
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On Thu, Oct 23, 1997 at 10:01:46AM +0100, Gordon Henderson wrote: > On Thu, 23 Oct 1997, Greg Lehey wrote: > >> On Thu, Oct 23, 1997 at 09:39:55AM +0100, Gordon Henderson wrote: >>> On Thu, 23 Oct 1997, Greg Lehey wrote: >>> >>>> On Wed, Oct 22, 1997 at 09:38:52PM -0700, 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.) >>>> >>>> Doesn't rm -rf work? Otherwise you could try >>>> >>>> find dir | xargs rm -rf >>> >>> I do the following to clear this from time to time >>> >>> cd /var/news/spool/control >>> mv cancel cancel.old >>> >>> (then a new one gets created and news keeps on going) >>> >>> cd cancel.old >>> ls -f > /var/tmp/cancel.rm >>> xargs rm -f < /var/tmp/cancel.rm >> >> This is unnecessarily complicated. Together, they're approximately >> the same as what I suggested above. You certainly don't need to store >> the output of ls in a file. > > Find will try to sort the directory first before printing it - I belive > it's the sort that causes the machine to run out of memory. Yes, this is a good point. > And yes, it's probably true that you don't have to store it in a file, but > I always wonder the wisdom of modifying the thing you are reading from! You're not modifying anything. Piping just moves the data from one process to another. Greg
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