How Do I Delete a Large Number of Files or Folders from a Linux OS?

rm Command

Delete all files in the current directory. The asterisk (*) indicates all files in the current directory.

rm -f *

find Command

• Delete empty folders in a batch. -type d is used to filter items whose file type is directory, and -empty is used to filter empty folders.

  find . -type d -empty -delete

• Delete files in a batch. The asterisk (*) is used to specify the file name.

  find . -name *.log -type f -delete

• Forcibly delete non-empty folders in a batch. The asterisk (*) is used to specify the folder name.

  find . -type d -name * -exec rm -fr "{}" \;

• Delete non-empty folders in a batch. The asterisk (*) and question mark (?) indicate different folder names. Use -o to separate folder names and -name.

  find . \( -name * -o -name ? \) -type d -exec rm -fr "{}" \;

rsync

1. Install rsync.
   1. On Ubuntu or Debian, run the following command to install rsync:

      sudo apt install rsync

   2. On CentOS, RHEL, or Fedora, run the following command to install rsync:

      #For CentOS 7, RHEL 7, or an earlier version
      sudo yum install rsync
      #For CentOS 8, RHEL 8, or Fedora
      sudo dnf install rsync

2. Create an empty folder dst_test and run the following command to delete the large number of files. This command is used to quickly clear the entire origin_test folder instead of deleting files individually.

   rsync -a --delete dst_test/ origin_test/

Python SDK

The following example code is used to delete all files in the test folder:

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# test.py
import os
import time
stime=time.time()
for pathname,dirnames, filenames in os.walk('/home/username/test'):
     for filename in filenames:
         file=os.path. join(pathname, filename)
         os.remove(file)
ftime=time.time()
print ftime-stime

Run the following script:

python test.py