question for server guru---how to delete folder with many files
 

i want to do some cleanup on our servers.

specifically delete the folders that contain several hundred thousand small jpg files of TGP thumbs.

i will use SSH

now when i use regular "rm" command it times out.

what's the easy way to do this---what is the command line?

(delete the folder and all files in it---there might be 100K individual small jpg files within the "thumbs" folder)

thanks to anyone who knows!

rm -rf folder/

???

rm -rf foldername

If that gives you an error about too many files do it quick and dirty

bash
for i in `ls`
do
rm -rf $i
done

and wait

dont see how rm-rf would have trouble with anything. you can delete your entire harddrive if you want with that command

Quick note - only do that bash script inside the folder that you're trying to remove - don't do it from... say / or /home or anything crazy like that.

The smart thing would be to hire a server admin if you don't understand that concept tho :2 cents:

I've had rm issues before where the filecount was too large - say if you were doing rm *.jpg - or in my case, I was deleting all locked messages in my spam folder (about 450,000 of them)

or just
find . -type f -exec rm {} \;

two curly braces replaced by stupid board.

you would have to do it in the directory you want all the files removed.

because the file count exceeds the maximum argument length from the kernel.

What about

cp /dev/null /folder

thanks you guys.


OK, so in other words i,


cd to the thumbs directory


and then type the command below?:


rm -rf folder/

yes, if you want to clean out /thumbs then do

rm -rf *

that will empty it

MAKING SURE YOURE IN THE "THUMBS" DIR BEFORE YOU DO THE ABOVE