Linda Walsh wrote:
time rm -fr .
183.23sec 0.69usr 36.25sys (20.16% cpu)
time find . ! -name . -prune -exec rm -fr {} +
219.58sec 0.87usr 40.81sys (18.98% cpu) -- about 36 seconds (~20%) longer
Benchmarks like this are often suspect since a lot of it depends on factors that
are hard to reproduce. That being said, when I tried a similar benchmark on my
machine, the 'find' solution was over 30% faster. In any event the minor
performance improvements we're talking about would not be a compelling argument
for adding UI complexity to 'rm', even if the 'rm' approach was uniformly faster
But you also didn't address points (3), (4) or (5)..
They aren't a problem either. As I mentioned, the "find" approach conforms to
POSIX and so is quite portable; that covers (3). If you don't want to cross
file system boundaries, add the POSIX-required -xdev option to 'find' and the
GNU extension --one-file-system argument to 'rm'; that covers (4). And the
example already uses rm's -f option; that covers (5).
