How to remove many (200 000) files?

Question

I must remove 200 000 files (all of them) from a folder, and I don't want to delete the folder itself.

using rm, I get an "Argument list too long" error. I've tried to do something with xargs, but I'm not a Shell Guy, so it doesn't work:

find -name * | xargs rm -f

Answer 1

$ find /path/to/folder -type f -delete

Answer 2

You are doing everything right. It is the '*' that gives you a problem (the shell is expanding it into list of files instead of the find). The right syntax could be:

cd <your_directory>; find . -type f | xargs rm -f
find <your_directory> -type f | xargs rm -f

(The latter is a bit less efficient since it will pass longer names to xargs, but you will hardly notice :-) )

Alternatively, you could escape your '*' like this (however in that case it will also try also remove "." and ".."; it is not a biggie - you will just get a little warning :-) ):

find . -name '*' | xargs rm -f
find . -name "*" | xargs rm -f
find . -name \* | xargs rm -f

If your file names contain spaces then use this:

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

Answer 3

you can try

find /path/to/folder -type f -print0  | xargs -0 rm -f

or

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

Answer 4

The following command will delete all files from the current directory:

find . -type f -exec rm {} \;