Summary: deleting large numbers of files

From: James Anderson <anderson_at_ocaxp1.cc.oberlin.edu>
Date: Wed, 06 Aug 1997 11:06:29 -0400 (EDT)

the problem:

On Tue, 5 Aug 1997, James Anderson wrote:

>
> Seems someone on the net has taken it upon themselves to issue cancel
> messages for anything they consider a spam in the entire alt.* hierarchy.
> At this point the highest message number in the control.cancel hierarchy
> is over 7000000. the directory itself is over 5 meg in size. is there an
> easy way to say, blow that entire directory away without using rm? (keep
> getting either arglist too long or the shell faults if I do a rm * or rm
> -rf). I'd rather not newfs the partition, but I'm getting to that point.
> This is an Alphaserver 400 running 3.2c and inn.
>
> Jim
>

The solutions? Too numerous to mention... most focused on using find and
xargs which is what I ended up doing. Some interesting ideas on using
unlink and such too. Thanks to all who responded.

Jim

ps - executive summary - find . -print |xargs rm -f

----
_______________________________________________________________________________
James C. Anderson                      PHONE: (216) 775-6929
Computer Systems Manager                 FAX: (216) 775-8573
Houck Computing Center                 Email: anderson_at_ocaxp1.cc.oberlin.edu
Oberlin College                   Home Page: http://www.oberlin.edu/~anderson/
Oberlin, OH 44074
_______________________________________________________________________________
Received on Wed Aug 06 1997 - 17:21:56 NZST

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