On 2009-03-18_16:37:53, kj wrote: > Hi guys, > > This might seem like a stupid question, but I'm hoping there's a better way. > > I discovered a Maildir on my server with 4+ million mails in. The result > of a cronjob that runs every minute - this has been fixed. > > Now, I've been running the usual find . -type f -exec rm {} \; > but this is going at about 700,000 per day. Would simply doing an rm -rf > on the Maildir be quicker? Or is there a better way? > > Thanks > > --kj
I presume there is a single directory entry that is root to the portion of your file system where these files reside. I further presume that ALL the files in this portion of the file system should be deleted. For this, supposing the the name of the root is 'foo' and the path to 'foo' is 'bar' the command to use is rm -rm /bar/foo NOt some fiddle using 'find'. Better than the "rm" command, above, I suggest: Create a path, on the same disk to a place called 'hide', and mv /bar/foo /hide rm -rf /hide/foo & This moves the junk emails to a place where they are not visible to normal activities on the system. Then starts the 'rm' job in the background so that you can use the console for other activities while the job is running. You can monitor the progress of the job by running 'df' when you are curious about how much progress has been made. I suggest 'lost+found' as a good choice for 'hide'. HTH -- Paul E Condon pecon...@mesanetworks.net -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org