rmtree
| Crates.io | rmtree |
| lib.rs | rmtree |
| version | 1.2.0 |
| created_at | 2025-07-20 01:30:50.46973+00 |
| updated_at | 2025-07-20 09:58:17.590849+00 |
| description | rmtree is a faster rm -rf |
| homepage | https://gitlab.com/davvid/rmtree |
| repository | https://gitlab.com/davvid/rmtree |
| max_upload_size | |
| id | 1760636 |
| size | 45,343 |
David Aguilar (davvid)
documentation
README
rmtree
rmtree is a faster rm -rf.
rmtree speeds up recursive file and directory removal by performing filesystem
traversals and removals in parallel.
# Install the "rmtree" command-line tool.
cargo install rmtree
rmtree --help
rmtree /large/nested/directory /trees/quickly
Documentation
Run rmtree --help for command-line usage details.
Installation
Pre-built rmtree binaries are statically linked using
musl libc so that they can run on any Linux system.
Benchmarks
These timings were gathered on a 40 core Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6242R CPU @ 3.10GHz. The storage was accessed over NFS against a live cluster from a Linux host.
A modestly-sized C++ project with build artifacts was used in these measurements. The test directory contains 1663 directories and 5822 files totalling 12 GB. This skews towards many small files and many directories.
Timings
All timings were performed with a warm NFS cache.
As a read-only baseline, timings for find and sharkdp/fd are included.
| Command | Time (s) |
|---|---|
fd |
0.249 |
find |
0.448 |
The following table summarizes the timings for rm -rf from GNU coreutils 8.32 and
rmtree with different thread settings.
| Command | Time (s) | Speedup | Scaling | Normalized |
|---|---|---|---|---|
rm -rf |
25.697 | 1.000 | ||
rmtree -t 1 |
23.729 | 1.083 | 1.000 | 1.000 |
rmtree -t 2 |
11.146 | 2.305 | 2.129 | 1.064 |
rmtree -t 3 |
7.866 | 3.267 | 3.017 | 1.006 |
rmtree -t 4 |
5.476 | 4.693 | 4.333 | 1.083 |
rmtree -t 5 |
4.556 | 5.640 | 5.208 | 1.042 |
rmtree -t 6 |
4.041 | 6.359 | 5.872 | 0.978 |
rmtree -t 7 |
3.581 | 7.176 | 6.626 | 0.947 |
rmtree -t 8 |
3.039 | 8.456 | 7.808 | 0.976 |
rmtree -t 9 |
2.712 | 9.475 | 8.750 | 0.972 |
rmtree -t 10 |
2.635 | 9.752 | 9.005 | 0.901 |
rmtree -t 11 |
2.179 | 11.793 | 10.890 | 0.990 |
rmtree -t 12 |
2.039 | 12.603 | 11.638 | 0.970 |
rmtree -t 16 |
1.941 | 13.239 | 12.225 | 0.764 |
rmtree -t 20 |
1.634 | 15.726 | 14.522 | 0.726 |
rmtree -t 24 |
1.354 | 18.979 | 17.525 | 0.730 |
rmtree -t 32 |
1.655 | 15.527 | 14.338 | 0.448 |
Relative performance is the performance relative to rm -rf.
Thread scaling is measured relative to rmtree -j1.
The sweet spot on the number of threads for maximum efficiency will vary depending on your specific storage and hardware. In this specific test, we can see negative consequences from adding more threads in the jump from 24 to 32 threads.
Links
Code Status
rmtree is actively maintained and its core functionality is stable and feature-complete.