Deleting 400,000 files

[VectraMan]

Well it's at least 400,000 because that's where I got bored with watching the folder properties count up. So who knows? It may be millions.

This is on a Windows 2003 server. The SMTP server has a badmail folder, which I'm guessing is where a couple of years worth of spam has been accumulating. This is what I'm trying to clear out.

If I try to select the folder with Explorer, then it just dies. If I right click and choose delete, it says "preparing to delete" until I get bored and cancelled it. And I'm currently running delete *.* in a command prompt, but that's having a good long think too and doesn't seem to be doing anything.

Is there any sensible way I can delete a folder and not worry about the contents?

This is a remote server I can only access via remote desktop. Part of the problem is if I just leave it doing something, the RDP session times out and kills the processes.

[voodooflux]

Give...

rmdir /s /q <folder>

...a go. It's still going to be slow but quicker than del *.* apparently.

[Spacecadet]

if it's on its own drive/partition then you could reformat it

[Not So Wise]

This will allow you see what is happening (instead of looking like it is doing nothing)

del /F /S /Q <Folder>

Also, this should stop it from happening again
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Edit: oh yeah, to the Remote issue, it on the same network? If so map to the folder from local machine and run command, bit slower in the delete but should have no time out issues

[Platypus]

Can you try

DEL A*.*
DEL B *.*

and do it in small chunks

[VectraMan]

Give...

rmdir /s /q <folder>

...a go. It's still going to be slow but quicker than del *.* apparently.

Ta. Had that running for half an hour now.

I guess del *.* probably builds a list of files to delete, then deletes one at a time which must in itself be really innefficient with a directory full of files.

[Platypus]

For %1 in (*.*) do del %1

Does it one at a time.

Yes, but "*.*" still has to be evaluated

[VectraMan]

It took nearly 4 hours, but it's gone!

I'll try out that cleanup program. Thanks all.

[RichardCranium]

What you need to do first is disable the Recycle Bin and then it will go like the clappers.

It took nearly 4 hours, but it's gone!

Oh, never mind.

[AtW]

Windows (NTFS) is not good when dealing with a lot of small files, it can be faster to reformat the whole disk or copy it using per sector copying.

SKA had to change algorithm on how it stores small files sometime in 2006.