Hi,

Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu wrote on 2009-08-14 11:46:02 -0400 [Re: [BackupPC-users] 
backups don't complete - don't know why]:
> [...]
> I found a gnome mplayer cache dir in my home dir which
> had MILLIONS of files in them. [...]
> 
> It took several days of running "find . -type f -exec rm -f '{}' +" off
> and on to delete the files, before backuppc was finally able to
> backup /home.

yes, forking a process for each of millions of files will take virtually
forever. Next time, you can cut that down to a fraction with something like

        find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm

or

        find . -type f -print0 | perl -n0e unlink

or even

        find2perl . -type f -exec rm {} \; | perl

(which special-cases the 'rm' to use Perl unlink and is probably the fastest
version).

If you want to see what's going on (at the cost of slowing it down a bit),

        find . -type f -print0 | perl -lp0e unlink

or
        find2perl . -type f -print -exec rm {} \; | perl

Finally, if you simply want to delete the whole substructure, use good old

        cd ..; rm -r name_of_directory

(add a '-v' to see what's being removed and a '-f' if you need it).

You'll want to be careful with all of the commands if you use '.' instead of a
full (or at least relative) path, because it's really easy to type them into
the wrong shell window, for instance ...

Note that a fraction of "several days" may still be long (unlinking millions
of files simply takes time), but the keyword is "fraction". The longer your
original task took, the more time you will save.

Regards,
Holger

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