[clue-tech] Why is rm so slow?

[David L. Anselmi]

David L. Willson wrote:
> How do I get rm to stop "sweeping up", and just mark the space available, instead?  It
> takes a ridiculous amount of time to delete large files.

Why do you think rm is sweeping up?  Just because it's slow?  I'm 
betting it doesn't do that (since there's no option to turn it off). 
You may be thinking of shred.

What kind of filesystem?  What block size?  What mount options 
(caching)?  What drive interface?  Any chance you have marginal blocks 
on the disk?

If you have to move all the blocks to the free list synchronously, it 
might take a bit.

Dave