I have so many (hundreds of thousands) files and directories within this one specific directory that my "rm -rf" command to delete them has been taking forever.
I did this via the SSH, my question is: if my SSH connection times out before rm -rf finishes, will it continue to delete all of those directories?
If not, what is the solution around this ?
If ssh quits, it will probably kill rm.
You could do nohup rm -Rf /path/to/folder & disown to put it into the background.
It's not a good idea to let that many files accumulate in any single folder, as you have discovered.
This has happened to me on several occasions. Not a timeout per se, but the connection drops or something like that. There are ways to make the the rm process nearly immortal. But I simply reconnect and restart the command. The files that were deleted do not come back... they stay gone. So you don't lose any progress.
did this, only took a couple of tries
If this task is performed regularly, you should consider using a dedicated filesystem. When the time comes to wipe it, instead of rm use mkfs (or newfs, or whatever tool your system uses to create a filesystem).
Regards,
Alister
Agreed, on some systems I actually do mkfs on boot for temporary cache partitions. Not just to clean it out, but to make it more robust -- the oft-changed SQUID cache is the most likely partition to go unfixably south if someone pulls the power for whatever reason.