Very large directory

[Oliver Fromme]

Peter Jeremy <PeterJeremy at optushome.com.au> wrote:
 > On Wed, 2005-Jan-19 21:30:53 -0600, Phillip Salzman wrote:
 > > They've been running for a little while now - and recently we've noticed a
 > > lot of disk space disappearing.  Shortly after that, a simple du into our
 > > /var/spool returned a not so nice error:
 > > 
 > >       du: fts_read: Cannot allocate memory
 > > 
 > > No matter what command I run on that directory, I just don't seem to have
 > > enough available resources  to show the files let alone delete them (echo *,
 > > ls, find, rm -rf, etc.)
 > 
 > I suspect you will need to write something that uses dirent(3) to scan
 > the offending directory and delete (or whatever) the files one by one.
 > 
 > Skeleton code (in perl) would look like:
 > [...]

I would suggest trying this simple hack:

cd /var/spool/directory ; cat . | strings | xargs rm -f

It's a dirty hack, but might work, if the file names in
that directory aren't too strange (no spaces etc.).

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
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