Deleting hundereds of thousand of files in Linux.

So, it turns out that in Linux the rm command can't handle deleting huge numbers of files.  In my case, I wanted to delete 400,000 files from a directory because said directory had used up all the available inodes on that drive.

Trying to do an rm -rf * would produce an "argument list too long" error.  So I searched around and found that you can do this from within the offending directory:

find . -name '*' | xargs rm

Which essentially finds and deletes each file individually, running rm over and over again.  It didn't even take THAT long to run (5-10 minutes or so).

Remember to change to the offending directory first though, this can be pretty destructive if run on the wrong directory.