Linux – How to remove directory on NFS fileystem with an enormous number of files

findlinuxnfs

A poorly tested program created a directory on an NFS share with an enormous number of files, which I need to remove. 

ls -ald /home/foo
drwxrwxr-x 2 503 503 317582336 Jul 29 11:38 /home/foo

The directory is located on an NFS mount of about 600GB on a netapp-type device. I atually have no idea how many files are in it but a similar directory created after only 10 minutes has 121,000 files, so it's probably in the millions somewhere. OS is Linux 2.6 kernel.

Trying to find a way to list or remove it and its contents. find /home/foo results in find dying after about 1 hour, with no output other than "./"

Best Answer

(answering my own question in case anyone finds it while searching for similar.) There are possibly as many as 9 million files in the directory.

Unfortunately can't log in to the server directly, it's an appliance. The only access to the filesystems is via export.

rm -rf didn't seem to work. watching with strace it was hanging.

find woudn't complete, died with no error.

ls -1 never seemed to complete. (I realize now that it attempts to sort the results, ls -1f might have worked eventually).

what did work was a simple perl snippet. I assume c code do the same would work. 

 opendir( my $dh,  '/home/foo' ) or die $!
    while ( my $file = readdir $dh ) {
        print "$file\n";
    }
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