Hide

What's this?

commandlinefu.com is the place to record those command-line gems that you return to again and again.

Delete that bloated snippets file you've been using and share your personal repository with the world. That way others can gain from your CLI wisdom and you from theirs too. All commands can be commented on, discussed and voted up or down.

If you have a new feature suggestion or find a bug, please get in touch via http://commandlinefu.uservoice.com/

Get involved!

You can sign-in using OpenID credentials, or register a traditional username and password.

OpenID
or
Sign in Register

First-time OpenID users will be automatically assigned a username which can be changed after signing in.

Hide

Stay in the loop…

Follow the Tweets.

Every new command is wrapped in a tweet and posted to Twitter. Following the stream is a great way of staying abreast of the latest commands. For the more discerning, there are Twitter accounts for commands that get a minimum of 3 and 10 votes - that way only the great commands get tweeted.

» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu3
» http://twitter.com/commandlinefu10

Subscribe to the feeds.

Use your favourite RSS aggregator to stay in touch with the latest commands. There are feeds mirroring the 3 Twitter streams as well as for virtually every other subset (users, tags, functions,…):

Subscribe to the feed for:

Hide

News

2011-03-12 - Confoo 2011 presentation
Slides are available from the commandlinefu presentation at Confoo 2011: http://presentations.codeinthehole.com/confoo2011/
2011-01-04 - Moderation now required for new commands
To try and put and end to the spamming, new commands require moderation before they will appear on the site.
2010-12-27 - Apologies for not banning the trolls sooner
Have been away from the interwebs over Christmas. Will be more vigilant henceforth.
2010-09-24 - OAuth and pagination problems fixed
Apologies for the delay in getting Twitter's OAuth supported. Annoying pagination gremlin also fixed.
Hide

Tags

Hide

Functions

Hide

Credits

Site by David Winterbottom (user root).

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Terminal - Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm
2009-01-26 11:30:47
User: root
Functions: find xargs
12
Up
Down
Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Using xargs is better than:

find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \;

as the -exec switch uses a separate process for each remove. xargs splits the streamed files into more managable subsets so less processes are required.

Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Alternatives

There is 1 alternative - vote for the best!

Terminal - Alternatives
find /path/to/dir -type f -delete
2009-12-09 01:30:52
User: SlimG
Functions: find
9
Up
Down
Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files

Using -delete is faster than:

find /path/to/dir -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm {} + find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm \-f {} \;
Comments (4) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious
find /path/to/dir/ -type f -exec rm {} +
2009-12-10 04:44:44
User: cfajohnson
Functions: find rm
2
Up
Down
Optimal way of deleting huge numbers of files
Comments (0) | Add to favourites | Report as malicious

Know a better way?

If you can do better, submit your command here.

What others think

cd /path/to/dir ; ls | xargs rm

Comment by speirs 220 weeks and 1 day ago

I think you can get find to delete for you with the -delete option, which I imagine might be fastest:

find /path/to/dir -type f -delete

or with the -exec xargs-like behavoir:

find /path/to/dir -type f -exec rm {} +

without launching the extra xargs process.

Comment by bwoodacre 211 weeks and 6 days ago

@speirs: Never parse ls: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

@bwoodacre: +1 for the "+"

Comment by dennisw 204 weeks and 1 day ago

Benchmarked this using the drupal-6.14 files extracted from http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.14.tar.gz

time find drupal-6.14 -type f -delete

real 0m0.024s

user 0m0.004s

sys 0m0.020s

time find drupal-6.14 -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm

real 0m0.030s

user 0m0.008s

sys 0m0.020s

time find drupal-6.14 -type f -exec rm {} +

real 0m0.032s

user 0m0.004s

sys 0m0.028s

time find drupal-6.14 -type f -exec rm \-f {} \;

real 0m1.700s

user 0m0.592s

sys 0m0.628s

Comment by SlimG 179 weeks and 6 days ago

how about this?

time rm -r drupal-6.14

rm -r drupal-6.14

0.00s user 0.04s system 76% cpu 0.049 total

find drupal-6.14 -type f -delete

find drupal-6.14 -type f -delete

0.00s user 0.04s system 108% cpu 0.041 total

Comment by bwoodacre 179 weeks and 6 days ago

rm -r will also delete subdirectories, whereas the find -type -f leaves the directory tree intact.

Just curious...why have people wanted to delete just the files and not the directories (and other stuff)?

Also, what does the plus do?

Comment by unixmonkey7434 179 weeks and 3 days ago

i have had this fail for me once on a machine with low ram, find couldn't expand the path, got the too many arguments error.

ls | grep string |xargs rm

worked in that situation.

Most other times find works fine :)

Comment by alf 159 weeks and 5 days ago

Your point of view

You must be signed in to comment.

Related sites and podcasts