Folder filled with 10M+ log files and I can't delete them

Question

I had a logging process go haywire on one of my servers and I now have tons of files that I can't delete:

➜  logs  ls -l | wc -l
11135951
➜  logs  rm log*
-bash: fork: Cannot allocate memory

Ideas? I could just blow the server away but I'm genuinely curious about how to actually fix this.

Answer 1

find . -type f -name 'log*' -delete

Would be the most efficient way to do it

In most cases replacing -delete with-print would show you all the files which would be removed. In your case though I don't think that will help

@biffen points out that it will do sub dirs too

To prevent this use the maxdepth argument

-maxdepth 1

1 limits to current dir