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Due to a script error (file_put_contents($text, $filename, FILE_APPEND) instead of file_put_contents($filename, $text, FILE_APPEND) I now have 4 million small text files in a folder.

I'd rather not nuke the whole folder, as a handful of useful files are in there.

All of the unwanted files have "jpg" in the middle of the filename, none of the wanted files do.

What's the quickest way to delete these? I can't even do a ls without it hanging my console at the moment - which makes identifying the names of the files I want to keep hard, otherwise I'd just move them out of the folder and then delete the whole folder.

Is find . -name "*jpg*" -delete the best option, or is there a better/quicker way?

Codemonkey
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1 Answers1

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With 4 million files, rm /location/of/many/files/*jpg* will probably fail with Argument list too long error.

Use find:

find /location/of/many/files/ -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*jpg*' -delete

or if -delete is not available:

find /location/of/many/files/ -maxdepth 1 -type f -name '*jpg*' -exec rm {} +
pLumo
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  • This is what I've gone with. Half an hour in and it's deleted half of the files. – Codemonkey Nov 13 '19 at 13:33
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    So use a better filesystem, like e.g. ZFS. BTW: find -delete is nonstandard and non-portable. find -exec rm {} + is not slower and portable. – schily Nov 13 '19 at 16:29
  • Thanks, I added that information. – pLumo Nov 13 '19 at 16:31
  • @Codemonkey, there is probably a way to use rsync for this; it's going to be faster than find. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/79656/135943 – Wildcard Nov 18 '19 at 19:19