cleaning a directory (was Re: Computational complexity of rm & ls)

[Randal L. Schwartz @ Stonehenge]

In article <871 at Portia.Stanford.EDU>, karish at forel (Chuck Karish) writes:
| Great, another feature!  How about using an alias instead:
| 
| 	alias rmall 'ls -f | xargs rm -f'
| 
| This avoids the overhead of sorting the names in the directory.
| It also suppresses those annoying queries from rm.

If the intent was to clean out a directory (and the directory itself
can be sacrificed and recreated), why not let 'rm' locate the files
itself, as in:

   $deadmeat=`pwd`
   cd /
   rm -rf $deadmeat
   mkdir $deadmeat
   chmod $someprotection $deadmeat

No big deal.  No passing of arguments to rm, and no need to worry
about .* files and files containing spaces and returns (yup, it's
pathological, but I worry sometimes...).

A certified UN*X Guru (Guru card #777)...
-- 
Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095
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