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Using rm -rf LargeDirectory to delete a large directory can take a large amount of time to complete depending on the size of the directory.
Is it possible to get a status update or somehow monitor the progress of this deletion to give a rough estimate as to where along in the process the command is?
from
man rm
use the -v option:
-v, --verbose
explain what is being done
I see the question is old. I want to share what it works for me to maybe help some else.
I get the progress bar using pv command line Pipe Viewer
This is the command
rm -rv DIR_OR_FILE_NAME | pv -l -s $( du -a DIR_OR_FILE_NAME | wc -l ) > /dev/null
If you need root permissions for the dir or file to delete,
sudo rm -rv DIR_OR_FILE_NAME | pv -l -s $( sudo du -a DIR_OR_FILE_NAME | wc -l ) > /dev/null
rm -rv: -r to recursively remove DIRs and files. -v verbose it lists all the files and directories that is removing.
pv -l -s: -l to count lines instead of bytes. -s set the total lines to be removed.
$( du -a <dir_or_file> | wc -l ): du -a returns a list all files and directories from the dir specified. wc -l returns the count of lines outputted by du -a.
> /dev/null: send the output of rm -rv to nowhere.
find {dir} -printf . | wc -c would be safer (but -printf is a GNU extension).
Mar 12, 2018 at 19:38
du will fail on items that were already deleted too quickly. Those errors can probably just be silenced, maybe by filtering stderr or wherever they are sent. Otherwise a great solution for long deletions.
You can view the progress of any currently running commands with Coreutils Progress Viewer(cv). It isn't like issuing a single command, but you can see the progress with it.
I'm sure someone can come up with an alias to run this with the command.
It also works with cp, mv, dd, tar, gzip/gunzip, cat, etc..
More details about it can be found at
If the directory to be removed has a very large number of files, du command might take a long time to compute the size of remaining files.
If you have a general sense of how much space the files take up or how much free space there should be after deleting the files, then as an alternative, while the rm command is running, in a separate terminal session/window, try watching how much free-space is left/used on the HDD.
For example:
Run watch df -h (all devices) or watch df -h /dev/path/to/disk (specific HDD)
ls would hang for a while.
Mar 23 at 8:10
rm * & watch 'ls -1 | wc -l'
It removes all files and watch remaining number of files (in current directory)
rm * & watch 'du -h'
it removes all files and watch remaining directory size (in current directory)
You can customize 'rm' command, e.g. 'rm -rf *', removing without confirmation all files/directories recursively (in current directory)
rm doesn't write to stdout, and watch doesn't read from stdin, so the pipe between them is pointless. If you want to run them at the same time try rm -f * & watch 'ls | wc -l' or consider rm -v *
Cross-posting from https://github.com/tqdm/tqdm/issues/991, if you have tqdm installed (snap install tqdm, conda install tqdm, pip3 install tqdm, etc) then
rm -rfv LargeDirectory | tqdm --total $(du -a LargeDirectory | wc -l) >/dev/null
watch -n 5 du -s LargeDirectory. Watch as it goes to zero.brew install watch, or see here for instructions.