From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jul 14 2: 2: 2 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from dt052n3e.san.rr.com (dt052n3e.san.rr.com [204.210.33.62]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D77A237BDB2 for ; Fri, 14 Jul 2000 02:01:57 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from DougB@gorean.org) Received: from gorean.org (master [10.0.0.2]) by dt052n3e.san.rr.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id CAA27027; Fri, 14 Jul 2000 02:01:50 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from DougB@gorean.org) Message-ID: <396ED6FE.74BA8123@gorean.org> Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2000 02:01:50 -0700 From: Doug Barton Organization: Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.73 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: any faster way to rm -rf huge directory? References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG "Eric J. Schwertfeger" wrote: > > Thanks to a programmer-induced glitch in a data-pushing perl script, we > are the proud owners of a directory with (currently) a quarter million > files in it. The directory is on a vinum partition striped across three > seagate baracudas, with soft-updates being used. > > I did "rm -rf " to clean up the directory, and that was > Monday. At the current rate of deletions (just under 10/minute), it's > going to be a week or two before it gets done, as it should get faster > once the directory gets smaller. It's only deleting 10 files per minute? How big are the files? As for speeding up 'rm -r directory' I don't see a way to do that, but how is the system load? I would go into the directory and do 'rm a* & rm b* & rm c* & rm d*...', until the load got too close to whatever safety margin you think is too high. Doug To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message