Which Linux Command Deletes Hundreds of Thousands of Files the Fastest?

Today we test the efficiency of deleting a large number of files on Linux.

Setup: Create 500,000 files

$ for i in $(seq 1 500000); do echo text >> $i.txt; done

Method 1: rm

$ time rm -f *

Result: rm fails with “argument list too long”; the command reports 3.985 s user, 0.29 s system but cannot delete all files.

Method 2: find with -exec rm

$ time find ./ -type f -exec rm {} \;

Result: Approximately 43 minutes (49.86 s user, 1032.13 s system) to delete 500 k files.

Method 3: find with -delete

$ time find ./ -type f -delete

Result: About 9 minutes (0.43 s user, 11.21 s system), total 9:13.38.

Method 4: rsync --delete

# First create an empty directory "blanktest"
$ time rsync -a --delete blanktest/ test/

Result: 0.59 s user, 7.86 s system, total 16.418 s – the fastest among tested methods.

Method 5: Python script

import os, timeit

def main():
    for pathname, dirnames, filenames in os.walk('/home/username/test'):
        for filename in filenames:
            file = os.path.join(pathname, filename)
            os.remove(file)

if __name__ == '__main__':
    t = timeit.Timer('main()', 'from __main__ import main')
    print(t.timeit(1))

Result: Approximately 529 seconds (about 9 minutes) to delete all files.

Method 6: Perl one‑liner

$ time perl -e 'for(<*>) { ((stat)[9] < (unlink)) }'

Result: 1.28 s user, 7.23 s system, total around 16.8 s.

Results Summary

rm: not usable for huge file counts.

find -exec rm: ~43 minutes.

find -delete: ~9 minutes.

rsync --delete: ~16 seconds (fastest).

Perl: ~16 seconds.

Python: ~9 minutes.

Conclusion: Using rsync with the --delete option is the quickest and most convenient way to delete massive numbers of small files on Linux.