Re: [CentOS] Fastest way of removing very large number of files?

On Fri, Aug 23, 2013 at 12:40:51PM +0200, Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:

I doubt saving functions calls is going to gain you anything in this case as 99.9% of the time the rm takes is on disk I/O. If you want to reduce the rm time you have to find a way to reduce the disk I/O it requires.

Correct.

If it's a whole directory (tree) that needs removing then I find

mv dir dir.o ; mkdir dir ; chown ##:## dir; chmod ### dir ; rm -r dir.o &

type stuff works just fine; the rm can chunk along in the background while there's now a nice clean empty directory for the application.