From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Jul 13 20:12:17 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from ns1.hutchtel.net (ns1.hutchtel.net [206.9.112.100]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5DA2E37B517 for ; Thu, 13 Jul 2000 20:12:12 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from jpaetzel@hutchtel.net) Received: from hacker (hutch-507.hutchtel.net [206.9.112.146]) by ns1.hutchtel.net (8.9.1/8.9.0) with SMTP id WAA30920; Thu, 13 Jul 2000 22:12:08 -0500 (CDT) Message-ID: <000b01bfed41$2ae2d870$927009ce@hacker> From: "Josh Paetzel" To: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" Cc: References: Subject: Re: any faster way to rm -rf huge directory? Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 22:11:12 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.2919.6700 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2919.6700 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG ----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric J. Schwertfeger" To: Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2000 4:08 PM Subject: any faster way to rm -rf huge directory? > > 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. > > I understand at a technical level why it is going so slow, so I'm not > complaining (I'm the one that insists that any directory with over 10,000 > files be split up). My question is, short of backing up the rest of the > disk, newfs, and restore (not an option, this is the main partition of a > live server), is there a faster way to do this? Not a critical issue, as > we have plenty of room, and despite the fact that all the drive lights are > flickering madly nonstop, the system's performance isn't off too much, > so it's more a matter of curiosity. > > I have a friend who I showed this to who made the following comment.... "Two weeks? There must be something wrong. Once softupdates are compiled into the kernel you have to use #tunefs -n enable on the unmounted filesystem to activate it. This only has to be done once." I pass this along just in the hope that it would help...I know nothing about the issue myself. Josh > > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org > with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message > To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message