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Questions tagged [rm]

75 questions
182
votes
31 answers

How do I prevent accidental rm -rf /*?

I just ran rm -rf /* accidentally, but I meant rm -rf ./* (notice the star after the slash). alias rm='rm -i' and --preserve-root by default didn't save me, so are there any automatic safeguards for this? I wasn't root and cancelled the command…
Valentin Nemcev
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123
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24 answers

rm on a directory with millions of files

Background: physical server, about two years old, 7200-RPM SATA drives connected to a 3Ware RAID card, ext3 FS mounted noatime and data=ordered, not under crazy load, kernel 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5, uptime 545 days. Directory doesn't contain any…
BMDan
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37
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5 answers

Could `rm -rf / --no-preserve-root` mess up the bios?

In order to see approximate speeds for tarballing an entire system, and then restoring that system when if it was foobar'd, I partially cloned one of our primary systems onto a workstation that, while not integral to our company systems, would be…
MirroredFate
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32
votes
11 answers

How to make `rm` faster on ext3/linux?

I have ext3 filesystem mounted with default options. On it I have some ~ 100GB files. Removal of any of such files takes long time (8 minutes) and causes a lot of io traffic, which increases load on server. Is there any way to make the rm not as…
user13185
29
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3 answers

Cannot delete folder with rm -rf. Error: device or resource busy

I'm trying to delete /var/www/html but I'm getting this error: rm: cannot remove `html': Device or resource busy
Hugo
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23
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2 answers

Will Ansible prevent the execution of 'rm -rf /' in a shell script

This is based upon this hoax question here. The problem described is having a bash script which contains something to the effect of: rm -rf {pattern1}/{pattern2} ...which if both patterns include one or more empty elements will expand to at least…
aroth
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11
votes
3 answers

Unix magic, delete all .pyc files from a tree of directories?

Is there a quick way of deleting all the .pyc files from a tree of directories?
interstar
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10
votes
2 answers

cannot remove file, Device or resource busy

I tried removing a file. The most relevant answer can be found here, but I found no luck. Here is the original problem: maxgitt@mgpc:~$ sudo rm -rf /var/lib/docker/ rm: cannot remove '/var/lib/docker/aufs': Device or resource busy To locate the…
Max
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10
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3 answers

Is there a way to delete 100GB file on Linux without thrashing IO / load?

I have a huge log file I need to delete on a production web server. I'm worried it'll bring the system to a crawl if I rm it on Linux. Any brilliant ideas? Update: Filesystem: ext3 Partition: /var (mostly logs and MySQL data) Log file is no longer…
objectoriented
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9
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10 answers

Best practices to prevent 'rm -rf /' in bash scripts

It's well known fact that extra space in env.variable can lead to deletion of / directory in bash script. #!/bin/bash ... rm -rf /$MYPATH if $MYPATH contains values like " dir" or "dir /" it will lead to "rm -rf / dir" or "rm -rf dir /". And will…
igorp1024
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8
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3 answers

How to keep subtree removal (`rm -rf`) from starving other processes for Disk I/O?

We have a very large (multi-GB) Nginx cache directory for a busy site, which we occasionally need to clear all at once. I've solved this in the past by moving the cache folder to a new path, making a new cache folder at the old path, and then rm…
David Eyk
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6
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3 answers

How to Fix Directory with all Question Marks as Permissions

I'm using CentOS 7 and trying to list a directory's contents but can't. When I try to list the contents, I get the following output: [entpnerd@myhost ~]$ ls -ali /data/sharedlogs/otherhost/ ls: cannot access /data/sharedlogs/otherhost/vcs: Not a…
entpnerd
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6
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3 answers

Difficult to Delete Files in Linux

There's a lot of stuff about this on the Internet, but most of the examples there are contrived. How does one delete files that are really stubborn? e.g., $ find ./ -inum 167794 ./àKÈÿÿÿÿ@ $ find ./ -inum 167794 -exec rm \"{}\" \; rm: cannot…
mgjk
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6
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3 answers

Remove directories in Solaris

I am using Solaris. I have several directories with the following names: saa_first.data saa_second.data saa_third.data I want to remove these directories along with its content, so I use: rm -fr saa* What I get is the following questions: rm:…
Rosdi
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5
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5 answers

How to remove a file where the file name has utf-8 character issues

I want to remove a file from a server via bash rm command. This is a sample file Test_ Mürz.jgp. How would one go about removeing files with such chars issues in the filename on a grand scale ... especially when you don't know the position of the…
mahatmanich
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