could someone please enlighten me?...

I need to clean directories which contain 500,000+ old files.

I'm using 'unlink' in a perl script to actually remove the files.

The system is: SunOS 5.8 Generic_117350-39 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V440

My question is: if I simply unlink the files, will the directory file and all the old inodes be automatically cleaned up, or will the directories still be slow due to the prior presence of so many files?

Is there a better strategy to deal with these large cleanup exercises?

Any ideas, please?

Thanks

In reply to unlink : reclaim inodes, etc.? by camelcom

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