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This blog gives different ways of deleting Big Directories and their relative times for deleting a directory with 500,000 files. The script using perl is reported to be fastest, which is given by 

cd yourdirectory
perl -e 'for(<*>){((stat)[9]<(unlink))}'

This answer is also reported in StackExchange-Unix&Linux here. The current script can only delete files just one level under the directory. Can anyone provide an equivalent perl script that deletes all subdirectories and their contents recursively?

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Abhinav
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  • What's wrong with using rm -Rf? – Jan Oct 06 '15 at 19:07
  • agreed with Jan - the blog article referenced in the question seemed to give up too easily when "rm -f *" failed. cd .. and rm -rf the directory. – Jeff Schaller Oct 06 '15 at 19:40
  • What is that stat call doing, and why is it in a boolean context with the unlink ?? (A more legible Perl answer would quite possibly involve File::Path qw/remove_tree/.) – thrig Oct 06 '15 at 19:47
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    @thrig: Read this for more details. – cuonglm Oct 07 '15 at 01:33
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    @JeffSchaller: rm -rf can fail with error argument list too long for huge files. – cuonglm Oct 07 '15 at 01:34
  • I saw that @cuonglm, which is why I was unimpressed when the article didn't simplify with "cd ..; rm -rf the_directory" (only one argument to rm) -- or did you mean to imply that rm -rf directory could fail if there are too many files in the directory? – Jeff Schaller Oct 07 '15 at 01:38
  • @JeffSchaller: Ah, I mean rm -rf * – cuonglm Oct 07 '15 at 01:42

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