Re: Best (most efficient method) recursive dir DEL

> On 22 May 2014, at 9:10, Kyle <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Hi folks,
> 
> I was wondering what is the best (as in most efficient method) for doing an automated, scheduled recursive search and DEL exercise. The scheduled part is just a cron job, no problem. But what's the most efficient method to loop a given structure and remove all (non-empty) directories below the top dir?
> 
> The 3 examples I've come up with are;
> 
> find <top_dir> -name <name_to_find_and_DEL> -exec rm -rf {} \;      - what's the '\' for and is it necessary?
> 
> rm -rf `find <top_dir> -type d -name <name_to_find_and_DEL>`     - does it actually require the ' ` ' or are ' ' ' good enough?
> 
> find <top_dir> -name '<name_to_find_and_DEL>' -type d -delete    - or won't this work for a non-empty dir?

How do you define "most efficient"? Run time? CPU cycles? Memory usage? Forks? Disk reads/writes? Readability/maintainability?

My personal guess is that a find command that locates the things you want to delete and ends with "-print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf" will satisfy most of those criteria.

(Xargs will stuff as many file names as it thinks will fit on the command line, but sometimes it gets ambitious - you might have to use "xargs -0 -n 100 rm -rf" to limit it to 100 file names per invocation of rm)

> 
> Or is there a more efficient manner which I can slot into a cron job?
> 
> Much appreciate the input.
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Kind Regards
> 
> Kyle
> 
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