Remove contents of directory, but not directory Post: 91628

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Remove contents of directory, but not directory Post 91628 by blowtorch on Sunday 4th of December 2005 01:25:58 AM

12-04-2005

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by pdc

It's not homework. I'm looking to know mostly out of curiosity, but you could argue that using wildcards is bad anyway. If there's a million files in the directory, that's a million rm processes (obviously not all simultaneous, but still). It's not bullet-proof:

/*skipped the code*./

On top of that, it's not easy to use from, say, an exec() call. You need the infrastructure of a shell.

So my question stands.

I dont think you have that right.. a million processes is not a million rm processes. Its all those million files as arguments to one rm process. Now that might fail due to too many arguments (any command can handle only a finite number).
I will give you your second argument about not being easy to use from an exec() call.

Why don't you use a slightly modified form of the find command that ppierald gave:

Code:

find . -exec rm -rf {} \;

That, by the way, would be a million rm processes (one for each file/directory that the find command would output).

blowtorch

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killall5

KILLALL5(8)						Linux System Administrator's Manual					       KILLALL5(8)

NAME

       killall5 -- send a signal to all processes.

SYNOPSIS

       killall5 -signalnumber [-o omitpid[,omitpid..]]	[-o omitpid[,omitpid..]..]

DESCRIPTION

       killall5  is the SystemV killall command. It sends a signal to all processes except kernel threads and the processes in its own session, so
       it won't kill the shell that is running the script it was called from. Its primary (only) use is in the rc scripts found in the /etc/init.d
       directory.

OPTIONS

       -o omitpid
	      Tells killall5 to omit processes with that process id.

NOTES

       killall5 can also be invoked as pidof, which is simply a (symbolic) link to the killall5 program.

EXIT STATUS

       The  program  return  zero  if  it  killed  processes.  It return 2 if no process were killed, and 1 if it was unable to find any processes
       (/proc/ is missing).

SEE ALSO

       halt(8), reboot(8), pidof(8)

AUTHOR

       Miquel van Smoorenburg, miquels@cistron.nl

								    04 Nov 2003 						       KILLALL5(8)

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