On 2009-03-19_01:56:26, Hal Vaughan wrote: > > On Mar 19, 2009, at 1:38 AM, Paul E Condon wrote: > >> On 2009-03-18_16:37:53, kj wrote: >>> Hi guys, >>> >>> This might seem like a stupid question, but I'm hoping there's a >>> better way. >>>
... >> running 'df' when you are curious about how much progress has been >> made. I suggest 'lost+found' as a good choice for 'hide'. > > Won't this run into a problem with the infamous "argument list too long" > response from rm that we've been talking about once it descends into the > subdirectories? > > Or is there some reason it wouldn't? > No. 'rm' uses recursive descent, depth first. At no point in the process is it doing anything but reading a directory-file and either unlinking the from the inode, or descending into the directory file that is at the inode, and ... If the tree is very deep there might be a stack depth problem, but 1) this doesn't seem to be a very deep tree and 2) I've done this on whole archive trees of 100GB and more. The process can take a while, but it will terminate successfully, if there is not a power failure ... And the push-down stack for tree traversal is just a stack of inode numbers which surely can be kept in memory for even the most monterous directory tree traversal! I think OP was put off by not having some progress reports about deletions in progress. It can take some time, because the OS updates the link count in each inode, and most of these inodes have a link count of just one when they are first 'statted', so it also has to put the inode back into its free inode pool. All these steps must happen nomatter what higher level software one tries to use. The only thing that is faster than 'rm -rf' is to reformat the disk, but I don't think OP is so desperate for speed that he will choose that option. Or, maybe, there really is nothing else on the particular disk in question... Maybe OP should copy the other stuff to another disk, and then reformat. -- Paul E Condon pecon...@mesanetworks.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
