That's a good point about rm. I tend to use rm -rf /dir/path/* for convenience. The first operation is a shell expansion on the files/dirs which are them fed to rm as as single list so the worst case is 2 operations. There are real limitations on shell expansion with long lists (yes I do know the workarounds). Anyway in this context I am sure (but untested, so I'm not THAT sure ;-) it would be way faster than unlink/rmdir with File::Find. For single files or known lists I do use unlink. Now I have a rationale! Thanks.