[LUAU] RE: How do you delete over 500,000 files in a directory

[Hawaii Linux Institute]

Jim Thompson wrote:
> You're going to be hitting 'y' for a long time.   Lets say you can get 
> 10/second, thats 50,000 seconds, or the better part of 12 hours.
I will always use the rm command with ultimate care, especially when 
removing a large number of files.  Typically I use the mv command (to a 
dump directory) instead (as the first stage of a two-stage process):

for i in m*; do mv m* ~/dump; done

Thereafter, if things look OK, use the rm -rf ~/dump command to remove 
all the files (second stage).  This process is reversible.  If anything 
screws up, you can always move the files back.  Wayne