del: Faster File Deletion

This is a Rust-based command-line utility that deletes files matching a given pattern in the filesystem, which aims to be faster than the "rm" command. It uses glob patterns (wildcards) for matching filenames and performs the deletions in parallel.

Features

• Accepts a glob pattern (Unix-style) to find files in the filesystem.
• Deletes files matching the pattern.
• Has a progress bar when there are many files.
• Implements retry logic for file deletions (up to 3 attempts).
• Uses parallel operations for efficient parallel file deletions.
• Logs success and error messages to the standard output.

What del does not do

• Shell expansion of wildcards resulting in "too many arguments" errors.
• Pattern-matching on directories: you must specify the single directory you wish to delete files in.
• Recursion.
• Directory deletion.
• Warnings: del trusts that your input is what you intended.
• Run on Windows.

Speed

• del aims to be faster than or equivalent to rm on Linux universally, and usually faster on MacOS.
• del uses parallel execution with a thread pool size and batch size calculated from the number of files with a formula derived from empirical optimization.

Installation

To install the utility globally, run:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo install del

Or download the binary directly:

wget https://github.com/SauersML/rm/releases/download/v0.1.1/del-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz && tar -xvzf del-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz && chmod +x del

Or build the program:

RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" cargo build --release

Usage

Run the utility with the glob pattern of the files you want to delete:

del "<pattern>"

Replace <pattern> with the glob pattern (e.g., *.log to delete all .log files).

Make sure to add the "./" if you installed via binary download.