Delete the contents of a huge directory in CentOS 6.6

Question

I have a directory in my webserver that has 116 thousand cookie files in it.

How do I delete them?

rm -r /var/www/html/secured/cookies/*

I tried this but it does not work.

-bash: /bin/rm/: Argument list too long

That is the error given.

ls -f | xargs rm will be faster than find. The -f option disables the sort (shell globbing always sorts; ls usually does) — mpez0, Jan 04 '15 at 01:42

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 03 '15 at 23:46

3

find /var/www/html/secured/cookies -type f -delete

Or something with xargs, but I prefer the find command..

answered Jan 03 '15 at 23:46

Craig Miskell

That worked a treat. Anyway to set this up as a cron job every 12 hours? – Ollie Jan 04 '15 at 00:03
sure, just put a "* /12 * * root find /var/www/html/secured/cookies -type f -delete" in /etc/cron.d/deletecookies – mgabriel Jan 04 '15 at 00:20

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 04 '15 at 00:00

1

Using perl?

perl -e 'for(</var/www/html/secured/cookies/*>){unlink}'

answered Jan 04 '15 at 00:00

kale20

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 04 '15 at 01:28

1

Unless you have hidden (dot) files you want to save, just remove the whole folder

rm -r /var/www/html/secured/cookies

Then, if needed, recreate it

mkdir /var/www/html/secured/cookies

answered Jan 04 '15 at 01:28

Kevin

3 Answers3