Deleting lots of files
I accidentally created 8 million files and every time I’m trying to delete them the server almost dies because of the rm process eating all disk IO (the server is remote without console).
Should something like this work i.e. invoking ionice?
sudo find /var/lib/php5/ -type f -exec ionice -c3 rm -f {} ;
I’d do something like this:
import os
os.nice(19)
dir = "/var/lib/php5/"
bad_files = [os.join(dir, file) for file in os.listdir(dir)
if is_bad(os.join(dir, file))]
for junk in bad_files:
os.unlink(junk)
time.sleep(0.1)
I would do it like this…
sudo ionice -c3 find /var/lib/php5/ -type f -exec rm -f '{}' +
the + is more xargs like (I think), and thus more efficient at very large numbers of files. putting ionice on the whole command should make every sub command also ioniced, as well as the search itself. Have you tried this?
you could also make it really nice nice -n 19 ionice -c 3 programname though it shouldn’t be necessary.
or taking a cue from @alex you could
ionice -c3 find /var/lib/php5/ -type f -delete
Maybe too silly.
What about deleting the whole directory structure?
find /var/lib/php5 -type d -print > /tmp/directories
rm -r /var/lib/php5
cat /tmp/directories | xargs mkdir