Is there a way to remove a lot of directories at once w/out having to empty them first

[mike worrell]

Is there a way to remove a directory that has tons of directories beneath it with files in each directory? This would really help out our DBA if I could do it.
Any ideas of away to remove without having to go to each individual directory and remove the contents?

Your help is most appreciated.
Have a great day
Mike

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Mike:

Yes.

# rm -rf /thedir

Be *very* careful using the '-f' (force) option. Make sure you know what you are doing and where you are!

Regards!

...JRF...

[Brian Bergstrand]

rm -rf

This will recurse and delete all files and sub-directories.

HTH.

[Pete Randall]

Mike,

If you can get a list of the directories, you could do something like this (as root, preferably):

for dir in `cat dir_list`
do
rm -rf dir
done


Pete

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi Mike,

# find /dir -exec rm -f {} \;

Robert-Jan.

[sysadm_1]

Hi,

Try
rm -rf /directory
Shaji

[ALPER ONEY]

Hi Mike,
I think that the best solution is what some other experts also suggested above:
rm -Rf /thedir
Regards
ALPER ONEY

[mike worrell]

thanks to all, that got me going.

[Geoff Wild]

Well....if those directories are the only ones in say the Logical Volume, you could just lvremove it - or re newfs it.

Rgds...Geoff

[Patrick Wallek]

Geoff,

That's kind of like curing a cold by chopping of your head isn't it? While that would work, it's a bit drastic. It would be MUCH faster than 'rm' would be though.

[Geoff Wild]

Patrick,

Yes - it is drastic :)

Just on MC/SG II course - and we just did it to clear our vg's.

Rgds...Geoff

[Robert A. Pierce]

An addendum:

You may want to add

`pwd`

and maybe

`ls -ld ./dir`

before

`rm -rf ./dir`

just to make sure you are where you think you are.

(A foaf tried to rm all files in a subdirectory, but ran into permission problems -- so he did `su - ` (instead of `su`) followed by `rm -rf *` -- ouch.)

Rob