I think that the mv / mkdir is going to be your best move... If you can't move the whole directory, try: mkdir /tmp2 mv /tmp/{*,.??*} /tmp2 (restart the application) rm -rf /tmp2/* /tmp2/.??* (it depends, of course, on the two directories being on the same partition). That approach especially works if the bulk of your files are in sub-directories You'll only be doing work on the inodes directly in the main directory, and then you can take your time deleting the subdirectories from /tmp2 while your app runs. <blockquote style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;" class="gmail_quote">I'm looking for clues about speeding up unlink performance. I have an ext3 file system (well, across several machines) that have a temp directory. The application needs to clean up the temp directory before the next run of the application begins and the engineers want to clean out this temp directory "quickly". </blockquote> -- Stephen Samuel <a href="http://www.bcgreen.com">http://www.bcgreen.com</a> 778-861-7641