On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 10:19:37AM +0100, Rainer Kluge wrote:
Tapani Tarvainen schrieb:
kj wrote:
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?
While rm -rf would certainly be quicker and is obviously preferred
when you want to remove everything in the directory, the find version
could be speeded significantly by using xargs, i.e.,
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
This is especially useful if you want to remove files selecticely
instead of everything at once.
This exact solution has been proposed just one week ago in this same thread by
Rob Starling
And this requires traversing the directory not just a single time but 4
milion times (once per rm process). Not to mention merely spawning 4
milion such processes is not fun (but spawning those would probably fit
nicely within 10 minutes or so)