How to quickly remove hundreds of thousands of files? [closed]

Posted by Nick on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Nick
Published on 2012-11-11T07:02:12Z Indexed on 2012/11/11 11:07 UTC
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Filed under:

filesystems

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files

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rm

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deleting

Possible Duplicate:
Doing an rm -rf on a massive directory tree takes hours

I'm running a simulation program on a computing cluster (Scientific Linux) that generates hundreds of thousands of atomic coordinate files. But I'm having a problem deleting the files because rm -rf never completes and neither does

find . -name * | xargs r

Isn't there a way to just unlink this directory from the directory tree? The storage unit is used by hundreds of other people, so reformatting is not an option.

Thanks

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