Gene Hightower

• Website: digilicious.com/
• About: I blog

Recent Actions

• Commented on Perl to the rescue: case study of deleting a large directory
  No, you're right: like 100 to 150 million....
• Commented on Perl to the rescue: case study of deleting a large directory
  When I do the math, 3-5 spam mails a second for a year gives us more like a million to a million and a half files. Even a million files is enough to choke the UFS2 file system, which is...

Comment Threads

• karsten commented on Perl to the rescue: case study of deleting a large directory

  Thanks!

  For a couple of days I hassled with exactly the same problem. 10 million files and every tool I used likes to cache the directory for "performance" reasons...

  Now that script is running on a clients OSX server where the rsync/osx10.6 problem spammed a directory.

• FUBAR commented on Perl to the rescue: case study of deleting a large directory

  This post is quite old already, but I found it due to a post of mine in the perlmonks website.

  As far as I checked, if you're in Linux, you could use a system call to SYS_getdents with syscall and avoid doing a stat() on the files and get their names to a list (or a text file).

  After that it would be just a matter to call unlink on those names.

  The downside is that I'm still trying to figure out how to use getdents with Perl. :-)