[GoLUG] Gigantic deletion

[Alex Finkel]

In situations like this, instead of running the rm command it should be faster to run:

‘find .wine -type f -print | xargs rm’

I think the rm command tries to look at the entire directory before it starts deleting while using the find command with xargs just starts deleting as it goes. 

In the above example, if there are any subdirectories, you could clean those up with a second find command or try the ‘rm -rf .wine’ again. 

-Alex

> On Jan 2, 2026, at 2:14 PM, Steve Litt <slitt at troubleshooters.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> My 6.9TB /scratch partition got up to 83% full, which triggers alarm
> bells even on spinning rust. In my investigation I found that a backup
> set , of /home/slitt, on /scratch, contained thousands, tens of
> thousands, or hundreds of thousands of files, in one deep directory
> under .wine. Because this was a year old backup, I performed:
> 
> rm -Rf .wine
> 
> This mass deletion has been running for about 14 hours.
> 
> Let me ask you a question: What kind of animal lets their software
> write more than 1000, let alone more than 100,000, files in the same
> directory? When files exceed 1000, lookup becomes slower. By the time
> you have 100,000 files, I'd estimate you can find maybe 100 files per
> second, and to do a deletion your Ext4 partition must search each file.
> 
> When I make a program destined to make a lot of files, I find a way to
> put them in a tree, with leaf directories each holding less (and
> hopefully many less) than 1000 files, so files can be found by just
> navigating down the tree. But nooooooo!
> 
> /scratch has gone from 83% full to 76% full in those 14 hours. There's
> plenty of other stuff on /scratch so I'll be lucky to get to 50% or
> 60%, given that most of these hundreds of thousands of files are in the
> 20KB range, while this /scratch contains many multi-megabyte and a few
> multi-gigabyte files. But at least with all these little basuras
> deleted, hopefully I can do a find command and find the big files.
> 
> One nice thing is that the more of these files that get deleted, the
> faster each deletion will go.
> 
> When this is done, /scratch will have *a lot more* free inodes.
> 
> SteveT
> 
> Steve Litt
> http://444domains.com
> 
> 
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