On Tue, 20 Dec 2005, Chasecreek Systemhouse wrote: > 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. what does globbing have to do with anything? it doesn't matter how much content there is under a directory if you simply run: $ rm -rf <dirname> if you do this, globbing is never an issue. rday
