Faster way to delete large number of files

find … -exec rm {} \; executes the rm command for each file. Even though starting a new process is pretty fast, it's still a lot slower than the mere act of deleting a file.

find … -exec rm {} + would call rm in batches, which is a lot faster: you pay the cost of running rm once per batch, and each batch performs many deletion.

Even faster is to not invoke rm at all. The find command on Linux has an action -delete to delete a matching file.

find ./cache -type f -mtime +0.5 -delete

However, if you're producing files at such a rate that find … -exec rm {} \; can't keep up, there's probably something wrong with your setup. If cache contains millions of files, you should split it into subdirectories for faster access.

Try using xargs:

find ./cache -mtime +0.5 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

Update explaination for @pradeepchhetri

If you use find with -exec, every file that find found will call rm one time. So if you found a huge of files, i.e 10000 files, you called rm 10000 times.

xargs will treat ouput of find as command argument to rm, so that, xargs will provide as many arguments as rm can handle at once, i.e rm -f file1 file2 ... So it makes less fork call, make program run faster.