Chasecreek Systemhouse wrote:
On 12/20/05, Mogens Kjaer <mk@xxxxxx> wrote:
That won't work on directories that have tens of thousands of files.
Why not?
As long as you don't do a:
rm -f /dir/folder-with-many-files/*
that, of course won't work, but
rm -rf /dir/folder-with-many-files
should work.
Have you tried it? rm will fail because the shell cannot keep track
of that many; the find cmd works because it deals with one file at a time.
The shell never sees the big list, only rm does. That was the point the
previous poster was making.
One thing that "rm -rf" won't handle though, is directories that you
don't have write permission on. Try this:
$ mkdir -p fred/jim/sheila
$ chmod 555 fred/jim
$ rm -rf fred
rm: cannot remove directory `fred/jim/sheila': Permission denied
This can be fixed using chmod:
$ chmod -R a+rwx fred
$ rm -rf fred
(success!)
Paul.
