Can't Delete Large Files

[Alan Cox]

> happen to cause some database corruption.  I then started getting hundreds
> of zero size files being dumped into the events directory.
> 
> I've cleaned up everything except now I can't delete the large directories.
> I have 6 directories totaling 180 GB of space.  I've tried rm -rf to the
> directories and the system literally hangs for days and the directories
> still aren't deleted.

180GB of small files will take weeks to create, and weeks to delete. No
suprise there. Disks may have scaled by 3 orders of magnitude in size but
they've not gotten much faster.

rm -rf will delete the files before the directories from the leaf nodes
back so you may just need to leave it running for as long as it took to
create the mess in the first place.

One thing that may be useful is for those six directories to

mv dir dir.old
mkdir dir
rm -rf dir.old 

as you can then recreate them before removing the old ones