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) -- Tzafrir Cohen | tzaf...@jabber.org | VIM is http://tzafrir.org.il | | a Mutt's tzaf...@cohens.org.il | | best ICQ# 16849754 | | friend -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org