Re: Delete 4 million files

[Mike Bird <mgb-debian@yosemite.net>]

On Wed March 18 2009 09:37:53 kj wrote:
> This might seem like a stupid question, but I'm hoping there's a better
> way.
>
> I discovered a Maildir on my server with 4+ million mails in.  The
> result of a cronjob that runs every minute - this has been fixed.
>
> Now, I've been running the usual find . -type f -exec rm {} \;
> but this is going at about 700,000 per day.  Would simply doing an rm
> -rf on the Maildir be quicker?  Or is there a better way?

Might be best to make sure the directory is indexed, if on a filesystem
which supports indexing, then use "rm -rf".

--Mike Bird