20 Dec 2015 / 1 min read

Deleting more than a million files from a Unix folder

If you ever run into folders with more than 50 thousand files on a unix system and you need to delete them, here's how you can do it.

> Archived article from 2015, from the old nutellino.it: commands and versions may be out of date.

> Machine translation from Italian: the original is here.

# archive# cli-utility

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Deleting more than a million files from a Unix folder

Hi everyone!

If you ever run into folders with more than 50 thousand files on a unix system and you need to delete them, here's how you can do it.

The problem shows up when you start the deletion and the system hangs. So you need to use a command with a lower cpu priority, or with different timing. Here are two examples:

Timing (slower):

bash

find . -type f  -exec sleep 0.01 \; -delete

This way, every time a deletion runs it waits 1 hundredth of a second

Or lowering the cpu priority with the "nice" command (faster but uses more system I/O)

bash

nice find . -type f -delete

These two commands let me delete a magento folder in a couple of hours, specifically the var/session folder, which had grown out of all proportion.

🙂