Linux, How to delete a folder with more than 1 million files?

Question

I'm working on a website for a client, and I just see a folder containing more than 1 million cache files.

I need to delete him, but i can't, i have this message : Argument list too long

I started to delete all files starting with aaa*, bbb*, ccc* .... but I do not want to spend my life... (rm -f aaa*.string.php)

How can i do that ?? Thanks !

Answer 1

find and xargs are your friends, as always:

find -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm

Or, for the special case of deletion (thanks, Eddy_Em):

find -type f -delete

Answer 2

Instead of removing the individual files, you could remove and then re-create the folder itself:

cd folder/..
rm -rf folder
mkdir folder

If this works in your scenario, this will probably be much faster than any method based on explicitly enumerating and removing the individual files.

Answer 3

Try

ls | xargs -n 200 rm -f

Will eventually remove everything

You can use grep to do pattern matching if you want to delete a subset of the files