[oclug] how to delete massive number of empty files?

[Dave O'Neill]

On Thu, May 16, 2002 at 11:32:16AM -0400, Jeff 'Gooey' East wrote:
> 	Well, that was odd.  The logrotate util wasn't properly making
> backup copies of my web server log files.  In short, every iteration it
> would geometrically increase the number of backups.  It just used up the
> last inode on it's partition, and all hell broke loose.
> 
> 	So, I figured I'd just "rm httplogfile.*".  Well, I got "arguement
> list too long".  So for the past 20 minutes I started with "rm
> httplogfile.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.1.gz.4.gz*" and worked it down, for both access
> and error logs.
> 
> 	So, given that I've corrected the mis-configured logrotate conf
> file, how can one delete all those empty files  more easily should it happen
> again?

'find' and 'xargs' are very useful in this case.  Something like:
	find /dir/containing/logfiles/ -name httplogfile.\* | xargs rm 
might do the trick for you.  Replace /dir/containing/logfiles with the
appropriate dir, of course.

-dave0
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