Limitation on rm command

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

Hi all,

does any one know ,if there is any limitation on rm command

limitation referes here as a size .

Ex:when my script try to rum rm command which have size of nearly 20-22 GB ..CPU load gets high ?

if anyone know the relation of CPU load and limitation of rm command .

2

Are you talking about rm in combination with the -r option?

3

i am using rm -f $FILE where $File having files which have nearly 20-22 GB size and Number of files=52603

4

So the variable $FILE contains a wild card ( *, ? and such )? What is the content of that variable?

5

ok here the full script part :

for file in $FILELIST;
        do
                rm -f $file && echo "Successfully deleted $file" 
                test $? -ne 0 && echo "Error while deleting files" && exit 6
        done

===============================
and

FILELIST=`find $D -type f -print`

(D= /a/b/c/*)

the count of

find $D -type f -print | wc -l

=52603

and size of D=/a/b/c/* => du -sh => 20 GB

when my script reaches this deleting part the CPU load get high
and i have to kill my script at deleting step
this is the complete scenario

7

rm -f always has return code 0 (see man rm)

for file in $FILELIST will not work for files with spaces in the name, and so the script will try to remove the part before and after a space...
It would be better to use:

find /a/b/c -type f | 
while read file
do

You could also let find execute the rm part.

1 Like
8

Thanks for the information !

but in my case the file name contains no space in name.

here what i want to ask does FOR loop in script for these many files containing the size of 20GB ...affect the CPU load . if yes then how ?

9

If these files are highly fragmented, the OS may need to do a whole lot more work to delete them. Otherwise, deleting large files shouldn't be an incredible burden.

10

there is always some memory / cpu cycles limitation with shell scripts ,try perl .