[nflug] rm Limitations

[Darin Perusich]

Ken Smith wrote:
> 
> That said in addition to the xargs suggestion you could do:
> 
> 	cd ..
> 	rm -rf directory-you-were-in
> 	mkdir directory-you-just-removed
> 
> (assuming there weren't any "dot" files in that directory you wanted to
> preserve - they wouldn't have matched the wildcard...).
> 

Removing the parent directory can be problematic in instances where say 
a daemon is writing files to said location. I run into this on email 
gateways running amavisd-new where the quarantine directory is 
continuously getting new spam and virii files added to it. Removing 
/var/spool/amavis/virusmails while amavisd-new is running would be very 
bad. Much like removing and touching a file syslog has open, all of a 
sudden the file is empty but nothing new is written to is and the file 
system continues to fill up! I did this *once* a many moons ago and it 
took a while to figure out what was happening.

The first works with GNU find, I'm not sure about *BSD.

find /var/spool/amavis/virusmails -type f -delete
find /var/spool/amavis/virusmails -type f -exec rm -f {} \;

-- 
Darin Perusich
Unix Systems Administrator
Cognigen Corporation
395 Youngs Rd.
Williamsville, NY 14221
Phone: 716-633-3463
Email: darinper at cognigencorp.com