SUMMARY: shell question

HI all,

I've got so many perfect answers from all of you. 
In general there are 5 ways to remove many files from a directory.

1. Easiest way is to "rm -r" the directory and then recreate it. Will help
save additional disk space as well as help performance on finding files in
the new directory as well. 

2. ls | xargs rm {} (More info on xargs:
http://www.coolcommands.com/index.php?option=com_ccadv&task=display&id=137)

3. cd to the directory where you want to delete the files and execute the
following.

for x in `ls`; do rm $x ; done

4. cd <workdir>
find . -depth -print -exec rm -rf {} \;

5. And very exotic way but still working (have not tried)
#! /usr/bin/perl
# set $dirname equal to /path/to/directory 
$dirname = "/path/to/directory"; 
# open dir for reading 
opendir (INDIR,"<$dirname"); 
# read the dirhandle into array called @dirlist 
@dirlist = readdir(INDIR); 
# close the dirhandle 
closedir(INDIR); 
# move to the appropriate directory 
chdir $dirname; 
# now nuke any file in the @dirlist unless starts with .
# or die on failure to delete and report error details 
foreach $file(@dirlist) {
	unless ($file =~ /^\./) {
		unlink $file || die "couldn't delete $file: $!\n";
	}
}

Best regards
Alexander


-----Original Message-----
From: Alexander [mailto:cloun203@mail.ru] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2005 6:08 PM
To: 'sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org'
Subject: shell question

Hi All,

I've got some tricky question.
Assume you need to remove all files from a directory

You issue 
#rm -rf *

But if you need to remove a million files. I suppose that in some shells it
won't work

The question. Is there any way to remove a big amount of files.

Best Regards
Alexander
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