Linux – Deleting millions of files

bashfindlinuxrmshell

I had a dir fill up with millions of gif images. Too many for rm command.

I have been trying the find command like this: 

find . -name "*.gif" -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Problem is, it bogs down my machine really bad, and causes time outs for customers since it's a server.

Is there any way that is quicker to delete all these files…without locking up the machine?

Best Answer

Quicker is not necessarily what you want. You may want to actually run slower, so the deletion chews up fewer resources while it's running.

Use nice(1) to lower the priority of a command.

nice find . -name "*.gif" -delete

For I/O-bound processes nice(1) might not be sufficient. The Linux scheduler does take I/O into account, not just CPU, but you may want finer control over I/O priority.

ionice -c 2 -n 7 find . -name "*.gif" -delete

If that doesn't do it, you could also add a sleep to really slow it down.

find . -name "*.gif" -exec sleep 0.01 \; -delete
Related Question