FASTRM (1)

SYNOPSIS

fastrm [ -d ] [ -e ] [ -u N ] [ -s M ] [ -c I ] base_directory

DESCRIPTION

Fastrm reads a list of files or a list of article tokens, one per line, from its standard input and removes them. If a file is not an absolute pathname, it is taken relative to the directory specified on the command line. The base_directory parameter must be a simple absolute pathname that is, it must not contain any ``/./'' or ``/../'' references.

Fastrm is designed to be faster than the typical ``|\ xargs\ rm'' pipeline. For example, fastrm will usually chdir (2) into a directory before removing files from it. If the input is sorted, this means that most files to be removed will be simple names.

Fastrm assumes that its input is valid and that it is safe to just do an unlink (2) call for each item to be removed. As a safety measure, if fastrm is run by root it will first stat (2) the item to make sure that it is not a directory before unlinking it.

OPTIONS

-d

If the ``-d'' flag is used then no files are removed. Instead a list of the files to be removed, in debug form, is printed on the standard output. Each line contains either the current directory of fastrm at the time it would do the unlink, and then the path name it would pass to unlink (2) as two fields separated by white space and a ``/'', or the absolute path name (a single field) of files it would unlink using the absolute path name.

-e

If the ``-e'' flag is used, fastrm will treat an empty input file (stdin) as an error. This is most useful when fastrm is last in a pipeline after a preceding sort (1) as if the sort fails, there will usually be no output to become input of fastrm .

-u

If the ``-u'' flag is used, then fastrm makes further assumptions about its work environment; in particular, that there are no symbolic links in the target tree. This flag also suggests that it is probably faster to reference the path ``../../../''