Hi all,

I have inherited an RHEL4 system that has somehow over several years generated a folder that has about 50 subfolders that each have 50-100 subfolders under them.. so something on the order of 50^75 folders going on. Between the large number of files and the age of the machine itself it's really causing problems for us, and of course this is a critical production machine too.

I let rm -rf go for several days and it barely made a dent.

I created a loopback temp image file and mounted it as a filesystem, and started moving folders into it in order to delete the image file .. but it also took a long time before it ran out of space.

I'm wondering if anyone has any other ideas how to somehow cut this folder off from the filesystem or do something to get rid of it. Is there a way to make the folder itself a filesystem without throwing it into an image file, and then erase it?

Thanks!
Matt