Commands to delete files in Linux and their example usage
To delete files in Linux, the most commonly used command is rm command. Let's see some example's of rm command.
[root@myvm1 ~]# rm -f testfile
**-f **used in the above command, will delete the file forcefully without asking for a confirmation.
[root@myvm1 ~]# rm -rf testdirectory
The above command will delete the directory named "testdirectory" as well as all the contents inside that directory(-r option used is to delete files recursively)
[root@myvm1 ~]# rmdir testdirectory
The above command rmdir, will only delete the directory if its empty.
Let's now have a look at some different methods of deleting files in Linux. One of my favorite methods out there is to use find command. Find commands is a very handy tool that can be used to search files according to its type, size, created date, modified date, and much more different criteria.
[root@myvm1 /]# find /test -type f -exec rm {} \;
The above shown command, will delete all the files inside /test directory. First the find command will look for all files inside the directory, and then for each result, it will execute and rm.
Let's see some different methods that can be used with find command, to delete files.
[root@myvm1 /]# find /test -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \;
In the above shown example, find command will search all those files inside the /test directory which are modified 7 days ago, and then delete each of them.
[root@myvm1 /]# find /test -size +7M -exec rm {} \;
Above shown example, will search for all those files in the directory /test which are larger than 7M, and then delete each of them.
In all of the above shown examples of find command, rm command is invoked for each and every file in the list. For example, in the last find command shown above, if the result is 50 files which are bigger than 7M, then 50 rm commands are invoked for deleting each of them. This will take a much longer time.
Instead of using the above command of rm with the help of -exec argument in find, there is a better alternative. We will see the alternative and then calculate the difference between speed in each of them.
As i told before, the main idea behind finding the deletion speed, is when you delete large number of files. So lets first create half a million files with the help of a simple bash for loop. And after creating half a million files, we will try to delete it with rm command, find command with exec argument and then will see a better find command alternative.
[root@myvm1 test]# for i in $(seq 1 500000); do echo testing >> $i.txt; done
The above command will create 5 lakh files (half a million) in the current working directory, with the name 1.txt to 500000.txt, and each file contains the text **"testing", **so the file size will be at least in the range of some kilo bytes. Let's now test the speed of deleting these number of files with different commands. First let's use the simple rm command, and then will use find command with -exec and then delete option to calculate the time taken to delete these number of files.
[root@myvm1 test]# time rm -f *
-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long
real 0m11.126s
user 0m9.673s
sys 0m1.278s
If you see the above rm command i ran on the test directory, containing half a million files, it gave me a message saying /bin/rm: Argument list too long. Which means the command didn't complete the deletion, because the number of files given to rm command was too big to complete. So rm command didn't even stand the test, because it gave up. Don't pay attention to the time displayed by the time command, because rm command didn't complete its operation, and time command displays the output without bothering about the end result of the command.
Now let's use our previously seen find command with -exec argument.
[root@myvm1 test]# time find ./ -type f -exec rm {} \;
real 14m51.735s
user 2m24.330s
sys 9m48.743s
From the output we got by using time command, it is clear that it took 14 minutes and 51 seconds to delete 5 lakh files from a single directory. This is quite a long time, because for each file a separate rm command is executed, until the complete list of files gets deleted.
Now lets test the time consumed, by using** -delete, **option in find command.
[root@myvm1 test]# time find ./ -type f -delete
real 5m11.937s
user 0m1.259s
sys 0m28.441s
Wow you saw that result!! -delete option only took 5 minutes 11 seconds. That's a wonderful improvement in the speed, when you delete millions of files in Linux.
Let's now have a look at how deleting files using Perl language works, and its speed compared to other options we saw earlier.
[root@myvm1 test]# time perl -e 'for(<*>){((stat)[9]<(unlink))}'
real 1m0.488s
user 0m7.023s
sys 0m27.403s
That's insanely fast compared to other find command, and rm command options we saw earlier. Till now this seems to be the best method that can be used to delete all the files in a directory. That's a remarkable achievement in speed for deleting files in Linux. If you see the output Perl only took around 1 minute to delete half a million files in that directory.
But yeah if you are interested in finding more complex options while using Perl, you need to have some good hands on with Perl regular expressions.
There is one more lesser used and less known method that can be used to delete large number of files inside a folder. This method is none other than our famous tool **RSYNC **used for transferring and synchronizing files between two local as well as remote locations in Linux.
Let's have a look at that method of deleting all files inside a folder with the help of RSYNC command. The method and logic used behind deleting files with the help of rsync is based on the fact that rsync is commonly used for synchronizing files between two different locations.
This can be achieved by simply synchronizing a target directory which has the large number of files, with an empty directory. In our case **test **directory has half a million files, lets create a directory called as blanktest, which will be kept empty for the purpose of simply synchronization. Now along with this we will be using -delete option in rsync, which will delete all those files in the target directory, which are are not present in the source(in our case the source is an empty directory, so all the files in the destination directory will be deleted.)
Empty Directory: /home/blanktest
**Directory to be emptied: **/test
[root@myvm1 home]# time rsync -a --delete blanktest/ test/
real 2m52.502s
user 0m2.772s
sys 0m32.649s
The results are pretty impressive, so its much better to use rsync if you want to empty a directory containing millions of files, compared to find command.
The below shown table summarizes the speed for file deletion in Linux, using different methods in Linux.
RM Command:
Is not capable of deleting large number of files
Find Command with -exec:
14 Minutes for half a million files
Find Command with -delete :
5 Minutes for half a million files
Perl:
1 Minute for half a million files
RSYNC with -delete:
2 Minute 56 seconds for half a million files