Shell Programming and Scripting

Hello folks,

I am deleting a directory with script it is taking 11Hour and also increase the IO on server. I am using below command, inside date directory there are hour directories, which i am deleting after archiving. Archiving is not taking long time, only "rm -rf" is taking alot of time with IOPS, please advise what should do to make it fast with less IO effect.

Code:

rm -rf $date

What is the value of $date?

What permissions were your script run with?

Make very sure that your script is only deleting what its supposed to be deleting!

1)date is one day old date 2014-01-14
2) i am running with root user
3) i am deleting correct directories.

If it's taking 11 hours to delete a directory, it's either a very, very full directory, or rm is deleting things you didn't intend.

If it's just a very full directory, rm doesn't have a "go faster" button for that. It's the filesystem that's slow, from having far too many files piled into one folder.

I saw a link and found that we can delete multiple files with this command, is it possible we can do something like this for date directory which is also having subdirectories and we if delete directory proper with less IOPS, how, i am confuse.

Code:

perl -e 'for(<*>){((stat)[9]<(unlink))}'

Running multiple rm's at once won't make the delete happen faster because rm is not the thing being slow here.
Using other utilities to emulate rm won't make the delete happen faster because rm is not the thing being slow here.

Your disk and filesystem are performing badly because, probably, far too man files have been crammed into a single directory.

Are there any network-mounted directories in there?