If you run an strace on rm you will find that it compiles a list by calling fsstat so with very large sets of files if you catch it right away it will be stopped before actually removing any files. Been there obviously ;) *Jason Lindberg* UNIX Systems Engineer 651.260.1354 On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 8:48 AM, jason reynolds <jeruvin at gmail.com> wrote: > I'm a big fan of running a ls command in place of the rm before giving it > the full run. > > > On Monday, May 20, 2013, Michael Moore wrote: > >> On Mon, May 20, 2013 at 8:31 AM, gregrwm <tclug1 at whitleymott.net> wrote: >> >> The difference I am wondering about is how the command responds to >> ctrl-c. >> >> For me, it looks like it deleted some directories and left others >> completely >> >> untouched. The "*" glob expands to a list of directory names, so I >> suspect >> >> the ctrl-c breaks the command after it finishes on the current filename >> >> argument. Thus, I think ctrl-c might not stop "rm -rf /home" until it >> is >> >> done. >> >> >> >> >> >> When I get commands like that which I need to terminate, I do: >> >> ctrl-z >> >> kill -9 %1 >> > >> > >> > you mean >> > ctrl-z >> > kill -9 % >> > >> > %1 may or may not be the right job >> >> Yes, good point. % is better. >> >> I don't usually background jobs so %1 is usually the only job I've got >> running in the background. I haven't killed anything I didn't mean to >> yet, but I'm sure it would've happened eventually. >> >> -- >> Michael Moore >> _______________________________________________ >> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota >> tclug-list at mn-linux.org >> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list >> > > > -- > jason > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20130520/44c0e235/attachment-0001.html>