oops... to many files and can't clean up...

[Robert A. Klahn]

To delete all the files in a directory, when there are a large number of
files, but dont delete any sub-directories or files in them:

ls | xargs rm # rm will fail on directories, because you did not use
"-r"

Need to be selective:

find . -maxdepth 0 -name "<wildcard>" | xargs rm
# or
find . -maxdepth 0 -name "<wildcard>" -exec rm "{}" ";" # Slower

Done care about subdirectories and the files in them too:

cd ..
rm -r <directory name> # Probably really want "-rf", its quieter, but
more dangerous.

Want to be "quick" about it:

cd ..
mv <directory name> <directory name>.old # "mv" is fast (on the same
file system), "rm" is slow
rm -rf <directory name>.old & # removing in the background, you can now
go do other stuff.
# including creating a new <directory name> and using it.

Good Luck.

Bob.

On Sat, 22 Jun 2002 12:05:04 -0700
plug-discuss-request@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us wrote:

> 
> Message: 3
> Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 21:55:30 -0700
> From: Austin Godber <godber@uberhip.com>
> To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> Subject: Re: oops... to many files and can't clean up...
> Reply-To: plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> 
> Perhaps it is was a shell limitations since that would be what was
> responsible for the regular expression expansion.  Sounds like most
> the problems you had were when you used *.
> 
> Austin
> 
> "John (EBo) David" wrote:
> > 
> > sorry to reply to my own message, but a quick update...
> > 
> > I went to another xterm and tried get a second look at things.  From
> > there I was able to see and remove the rest of the files (no idea
> > what happend to that one xterm to muck with ls/rm).  Anyway, things
> > are cleaned up, and that even seemed to fix things in the original
> > xterm that was causing the problems...
> > 
> > I may well still reboot and FSCK...  Any idea what could have
> > screwed up?  I remember that there used to be a limit of 10,000
> > files/directory or inode.  That is why I was originally concerned
> > with having more than 2.5 times that in a single directory.
> > 
> >   EBo --
> > 
> > "John (EBo) David" wrote:
> > >
> > > ummm....
> > >
> > > I have a unit and regression test suite for my ecological modeling
> > > virtual machine.  I needed to bump up one of the tests to run for
> > > a longer time for model testing.  Problem was that I forgot that I
> > > am creating an image dump for *every* variable specified each and
> > > every iteration... start_time=0, stop_time=25, dt=0.01... that is
> > > 2,500 images for umm... looks like 8 variables, and there are 15
> > > other unit tests...
> > >
> > > So now I find that I have over 25,000 files in a single directory.
> > > oops.  Ok, off to clean them up....
> > >
> > > First, ls and rm complain that there are to many files to "rm
> > > *.pgm", so I go though and delete them by group name... ok,
> > > appears to go ok.  Now I am finally able to "rm *.pgm" so they
> > > should be clean up.  Problem is that once I do that I still have
> > > hundreds of pgm files in the directory that "ls" reports, but an
> > > "ls *meta_pop*" does not.  I am affraid that I have corrupted the
> > > file system or something.
> > >
> > > any suggestions?
> > >
> > > thoughts:
> > >
> > >   shut down the machine, reboot single user, fsck ever partition
> > > (including XFS partions), and recite some prayer to Boolean...
> > >
> > > other ideas, thoughts, intuitions as to what happens when creating
> > > 10's of thousands of files in a single directory by accident?
> > >
> > >   EBo --
> > ________________________________________________
> > See http://PLUG.phoenix.az.us/navigator-mail.shtml if your mail
> > doesn't post to the list quickly and you use Netscape to write mail.
> > 
> > PLUG-discuss mailing list  -  PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
> > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
> 
> -- 
> Austin Godber
> godber@asu.edu
> Rotten Philomathian


-- 
Robert A. Klahn         robert@kint.org         AIM: rklahn

"Hope has two beautiful daughters: Anger and Courage. Anger
 at the way things are, and Courage to struggle to create 
 things as they should be." -- St. Augustine