Re: rm -rf fails

[Jim Meyering]

Martin Fuhrer <address@hidden> wrote:
> I'm using rm from the fileutils package, installed from source via the
> fink distribution on Mac OS X 10.2.8.  I notice that rm -rf frequently
> fails for directories with large numbers of files in them.  For
> example, after installing unpacking and installing kdelibs from
> /sw/src, rm -rf is unable remove some of the directories.
> The standard  BSD installed rm in /bin/rm has no problems.
> a sample  terminal session below.
...
> rm (fileutils) 4.1

Thank you for the report.
That is due to a bug in the Darwin/MacOS implementation of readdir.
I added code to detect and work around the bug in newer
versions of rm.  See the comments and code in m4/readdir.m4
if you're interested in the details.  The precise number of files
beyond which the problem arose for Darwin was 338.

The BSD version of /bin/rm works because it uses a different
approach -- one requiring more memory.

fileutils 4.1 is quite old.  There have been
many other improvements since then.

STABLE
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.gz
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.tar.bz2
  (coreutils is the union of fileutils, textutils, and sh-utils)

BETA
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.gz
  ftp://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/coreutils/coreutils-5.0.91.tar.bz2