/ 
App-rmhere-0.02
River stage one • 1 direct dependent • 1 total dependent
/ rmhere

NAME

rmhere - Remove all files in the current directory (with options)

VERSION

version 0.02

SYNOPSIS

In a directory with many files which you want to delete:

% rmhere -f

To show progress:

% rmhere -fp

To show progress and count the number of files first (so it'll show percentage up to 100% and estimated completion time):

% rmhere -fP

Delete recursively, set location:

% rmhere -Rf --here /tmp/files

Don't actually delete files, only show:

% rmhere -f --dry-run

Only delete files matching a wildcard:

% rmhere --nodir -R --match '*.txt'

DESCRIPTION

NOTE: Early release, some options not yet implemented: --dir, --file, --match, --recursive.

When deleting many files in a directory (thousands, millions), the venerable rm Unix command is rather cumbersome to use. If you issue rm * the shell will usually complain with "Argument list too long" because it expands the wildcard first. You can also use find ./ -type f -maxdepth 1 -delete. This rmhere command is equivalent to that, with some extra options and features:

  • Progress report

  • Dry-run

    Just set DRY_RUN=1 or --dry-run to enter dry-run (simulation) mode.

  • Recursive option

    Using -R.

For safety, the default behavior is -i. That means, if rmhere is executed without argument, it will ask before deleting each file.

COMMAND-LINE OPTIONS

--[no]dir, -d

Whether or not to delete directories. The default is to not delete directories.

--dry-run

--estimate

Count the number of files to delete first.

--[no]file

Whether or not to delete files. Default to yes.

XXX Should we have this option at all? Considering that -f is already taken for --force.

--force, -f

Equivalent to --nointeractive.

--here=DIR

Set directory to start deleting.

--[no]interactive, -i

Whether to ask interactively before deleting each entry.

--match PAT

Only delete item matching wildcard pattern PAT.

--progress, -p

Show progress report.

-P

Equivalent to --progress --estimate.

--recursive, -R

Delete recursively. Turn on --dir implicitly.

PERFORMANCE NOTES

My system: customer SATA HDD 7200rpm, Debian/Linux, ext3fs, Core i5-2400 3.1GHz. rmhere performs worse than rm for small to medium number of files (1-200k files), but as the number of files approaches 1+ million, there are practically no difference in performance as the bottleneck lies in the filesystem. Some numbers:

Creating 200k files using touch `seq 1 200000`: 5s.

Deleting 200k files using rm: 6s.

Deleting 200k files using rmhere -fP: 1m10s.

Creating 1 million files using touch `seq 1 200000`;touch `seq 200001 400000`;touch `seq 400001 600000`; touch `seq 600001 800000`; touch `seq 800001 1000000`: 32s.

Deleting 1 million files using rm fails ("Argument list too long").

Deleting 1 million files using find -type f | xargs -n 50000 rm: about 30m.

Deleting 1 million files using rmhere -fP: about 30m.

SEE ALSO

rm, find

HOMEPAGE

Please visit the project's homepage at https://metacpan.org/release/App-rmhere.

SOURCE

Source repository is at https://github.com/sharyanto/perl-App-rmhere.

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests on the bugtracker website https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Dist/Display.html?Name=App-rmhere

When submitting a bug or request, please include a test-file or a patch to an existing test-file that illustrates the bug or desired feature.

AUTHOR

Steven Haryanto <stevenharyanto@gmail.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2014 by Steven Haryanto.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.