[GoLUG] Gigantic deletion

[Steve Litt]

On Sat, 3 Jan 2026 17:04:52 -0500
Hendrik Boom <hendrik at topoi.pooq.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 02, 2026 at 02:12:41PM -0500, Steve Litt 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.   
> 
> In siyuations like this I would be inclined to copy the files

I had no place big enough to copy the files. 

> I want to keep elsewhere and then reformat te entire partition.

I'm 99% sure these files were useless. Deletion was a much better
solution in this case.

SteveT

Steve Litt 
Spring 2023 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques of the Successful
Technologist http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques