Thanks Peter (along with everyone else who's responded.) I've received a couple perl scripts from a few different people. I can't use any of them until this evening due to the current load of the machines though. Last night I ended up doing a strings on the directory, and taking its output into a for loop removing the files.
-- Phillip Salzman > -----Original Message----- > From: Peter Jeremy [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: January 20, 2005 3:46 AM > To: Phillip Salzman > Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: Very large directory > > > On Wed, 2005-Jan-19 21:30:53 -0600, Phillip Salzman wrote: > >They've been running for a little while now - and recently we've > >noticed a lot of disk space disappearing. Shortly after > that, a simple > >du into our /var/spool returned a not so nice error: > > > > du: fts_read: Cannot allocate memory > > > >No matter what command I run on that directory, I just don't seem to > >have enough available resources to show the files let alone delete > >them (echo *, ls, find, rm -rf, etc.) > > I suspect you will need to write something that uses > dirent(3) to scan the offending directory and delete (or > whatever) the files one by one. > > Skeleton code (in perl) would look like: > > chdir $some_dir or die "Can't cd $some_dir: $!"; > opendir(DIR, ".") or die "Can't opendir: $!"; > while (my $file = readdir(DIR)) { > next if ($file eq '.' || $file eq '..'); > next if (&this_file_is_still_needed($file)); > unlink $file or warn "Unable to delete $file: $!"; > } > closedir DIR; > > If you've reached the point where you can't actually read the > entire directory into user memory, expect the cleanup to take > quite a while. > > Once you've finished the cleanup, you should confirm that the > directory has shrunk to a sensible size. If not, you need to > re-create the directory and move the remaining files into the > new directory. > > -- > Peter Jeremy > _______________________________________________ freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
