On 12/20/05, Daniel B. Thurman <dant@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I have tried it many times. I have deleted the entire copy > of a copy of / (yes, a copy of root which is some 8GB worth > of files) so if this fails for you, perhaps you do not have > enough memory, virtual or otherwise. It is possible that you > may run out of memory but it has not happened to me at this > time. Maybe your mileage may vary as not all systems are the > same :-) This is pedatic; not all systems are the same but the operating systems should act the same. All the sytems I have used that the "rm -fr" command has failed on have been systems with less than 2GB ram. All of the files have been in the tens of thousands and the file names have been many characters long (I share file systems between NTFS and HFS+.) The bottom line: find operates upon one file and one directory -- rather than globbing them all into memory. Both FC5 ppc and FC4 ppc have this behavior as well as my various FC4 machines (I have 30 of them) and they all have 512MB ram and they all fail. The OP was seeking "ways" to handle directory removal -- there is more than one way to do it. -- WC -Sx- Jones | http://ccsh.us/ | Open Source Consulting
