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Re: Delete 4 million files



Top post because it is OT, but related. Yesterday I had occasion to
remove some old data from my system. I had a backup copy, and the data
was all on a single partition. I could have simply rewritten the file
system with mke2fs, but I decided, instead, to use rm -rf * at the top
level of the file structure.  There were about 25million files on an
7 GB partition on a 60 GB IDE drive. It took rm a little over an hour
to unlink it all.

(Yes, I know that unlinking doesn't get rid of the data. I wiped it
because I didn't want to leave it in place and forget that it is the
old data of which I have a perfectly good archival copy. Not security,
but good housekeeping.)

On 2009-03-25_15:34:54, Mike Castle wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Emanoil Kotsev <deloptes@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > Just curious - why would you use sort before deleting something?
> 
> You wouldn't, that was the point.
> 
> Someone was trying to turn that OFF for find; but find doesn't do
> that, so there was nothing to turn off.
> 
> 
> On the other hand, ls and the shells both sort by default, so there
> may have been some confusion there.
> 
> mrc
> 
> 
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-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon@mesanetworks.net


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