From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jul 13 16:39:39 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.100.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B8AE037B680 for ; Thu, 13 Jul 2000 16:39:34 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.acs.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id TAA191428; Thu, 13 Jul 2000 19:39:20 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: References: Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 19:40:21 -0400 To: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" , questions@FreeBSD.ORG From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: any faster way to rm -rf huge directory? Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 2:08 PM -0700 7/13/00, Eric J. Schwertfeger wrote: >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. Is it easy to tell which order the files were added to the directory? (easy to tell by the filename, I mean. It'd be murder to have to stat() each file to find out the order!). I wonder if it would speed things up at all if you could remove the files in the opposite order of the order they were created in. How large are the files that you are deleting? I wonder if there is any filesystem caching-related knob which he could temporarily turn up which would help speed this along. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message