Ever tried deleting a bazillion of files in one directory and got an “Argument list too long” error?¹ Find too slow?²

A long time ago, I wrote a short script that solved these kind of problems. I call it Walis (broom or sweep in Filipino). This script will recursively scan a directory and output the files with your command (and even add output redirection).

To use this script to delete the files, type walis /some/path "rm -f" | sh. To move files in separate directories into one, type walis /some/path "mv " /another/path/ | sh.

The script is very simple. You can modify it to check a file’s timestamp or do some string manipulation (useful for renaming).

I’m too lazy to take a look at bash so this is written in PHP. You just need the command line version of PHP to get this to work.

[Download]

¹ We found log files that averaged in 4KB in size. They were dumped in several subdirectories and rm -rf couldn’t do it.
² Tried find to delete old log files but it was so slow that it would’ve taken 3 months to complete the task. But an application was spitting out logs at a rate so fast, it would fill up the partition in a month.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 15th, 2007 at 17.59.12 and is filed under Geek Cred. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.