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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Too many files to list / remove Post 25662 by Perderabo on Friday 2nd of August 2002 08:06:46 AM
Old 08-02-2002
Handling a directory this large is going to require very careful attention to performance considerations. I usually hold my tongue when I see someone suggest the -exec option on a "find" command. But in this case, it will be a very large problem. A command like:

find /path/directory/ -mtime +29 -exec ls {} \;

is going to launch one "ls" process for each file. In this case, that is way too many. We need to get as many files on the "ls" (or "rm") command line as possible. That way, a single process will be handling dozens or maybe hundreds of files at once. We can do this with:

cd /path/directory
find . -mtime +29 -print | xargs ls -d

(I always use -d in a case like this in case the "find" output a subdirectory.) By cd'ing to the directory first and then use "." in the "find" command, we shorten the pathname that find will output. This means that xargs can collect more of them for each "ls" process that it invokes.

Using xargs is always better than -exec, but with a small number of files, it's not a big deal.

Peter may have meant "ls", the OP did request help obtaining such a listing. But can anyone read a listing that is 600,000 lines long? There is really no point to such a listing.

Any shell script written to process these files will also need careful attention to performance.
This:

for each_file in /path/directory/*

is not going to work. The shell will try to expand that asterisk and it will fail. Something like this:

#! /usr/bin/ksh
cd /path/directory
find . -print | while read each_file ; do

will work, but whatever the loop does it must be carefully coded. It must use only shell built-in commands and maybe some pre-launched co-processes. Invoking even 4 or 5 processes per loop will mean millions of total processes. Such a script would take a very long time to run.
 

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lndir(1X)																 lndir(1X)

NAME
lndir - create a shadow directory of symbolic links to another directory tree SYNOPSIS
lndir fromdir [todir] DESCRIPTION
lndir makes a shadow copy todir of a directory tree fromdir, except that the shadow is not populated with real files but instead with sym- bolic links pointing at the real files in the fromdir directory tree. This is usually useful for maintaining source code for different machine architectures. You create a shadow directory containing links to the real source which you will have usually NFS mounted from a machine of a different architecture, and then recompile it. The object files will be in the shadow directory, while the source files in the shadow directory are just symlinks to the real files. This has the advantage that if you update the source, you need not propagate the change to the other architectures by hand, since all source in shadow directories are symlinks to the real thing: just cd to the shadow directory and recompile. The todir argument is optional and defaults to the current directory. The fromdir argument may be relative (e.g., ../src) and is relative to todir (not the current directory). Note that RCS, SCCS, and CVS.adm directories are not shadowed. Note also that if you add files, you must run lndir again. Deleting files is difficult because the symlinks will point to places that no longer exist. BUGS
The patch routine needs to be able to change the files. You should never run patch from a shadow directory. Use a command like the following to clear out all files before you can relink (if the fromdir has been moved, for instance): find todir -type l -print | xargs rm The following command will find all files that are not directories: find . ! -type d -print lndir(1X)
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