How can I delete 50 million small files?

[Dmag]

I've stupidly set up an rsync backup of a sessions directory and there's probably around 50 million files in there now (at a rough guess).

I've tried to delete the directory but with no success.

The command I've been using is:

find . -type f -exec rm -v {} \;

What else can I try?

[smolloy]

To delete a directory you need to use the command "rmdir", or add a "-r" flag to the rm command.

Welcome to the forums by the way!

[i92guboj]

I've stupidly set up an rsync backup of a sessions directory and there's probably around 50 million files in there now (at a rough guess).

I've tried to delete the directory but with no success.

The command I've been using is:

find . -type f -exec rm -v {} \;

What else can I try?

In which sense doesn't it work? It should (only for files, not dirs, as specified by -type f).

The only thing you are missing is proper quoting around the brackets '{}', which you should always use unless you are 100% sure that no file in there holds special characters on its name.

That, provided that you have write permissions over those files, of course.