I have to remove many directory. but
rm -r /data
is so slow ( about some days) /data has
/data/a/b/c/d/e/f/g/h ....
many dirs
Does anyone know?
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Is `\data` perhaps a separate file system? – Bart De Vos Oct 28 '11 at 08:28
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http://serverfault.com/questions/183821/rm-on-a-directory-with-millions-of-files – quanta Oct 28 '11 at 08:29
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http://serverfault.com/questions/296032/what-is-the-fastest-way-to-remove-thousands-of-files-on-a-btrfs-filesystem – quanta Oct 28 '11 at 08:29
1 Answers
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Removing huge amount of files and directories is a long operation, no matter what file system you have in use. Depending on your I/O subsystem and file system it might help performing the removal in parallel; just put one rm process removing directories starting with a-f, another one with g-n, and third one with o-z. Or something like that.
Or if it's OK for you to just have file removal going on background, you can always
mv data data_to_be_removed
mkdir data
rm -rf data_to_be_removed
Janne Pikkarainen
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1Just what I was in the process of suggesting, Janne - I completely agree with you. Computers are there to do hard work that takes time, so we don't have to. `mv` the file system to one side, then `rm -rf` can be happily chewing through it freeing up disc while you get on with putting your new content in place. – MadHatter Oct 28 '11 at 08:39