UNIX command to format or delete all content on Flash Drive

Jeff,
Do you need to take the time to reformat for security or reliability reasons? (diskutil will take a bit longer)
If not then the unix command to remove is "rm", to remove securly (write blank data into the file before remvoing) you can use "srm". (rm will be very fast, srm will take as long as it needs to write all the data)

rm /Volumes/FlashDriveName/*

Needless to say the combination of rm and * make quite a mess. In this case if you get FlashDriveName wrong then all the files on that disk could be gone. For good. Really gone.

Reese

Hi Mihalis,
The second of your commands has a risk of failure because some of the directories may not be empty when the attempt is made to delete them. The problem isn't that the command won't try to delete all directories. The problem is that it tries to delete higher level directories before the directories they contain. A depth-first search will remedy that problem. Thus, I recommend the following form of the command:

find -d /Volumes/Flash -type d -exec rmdir {} \;

or

find -d /Volumes/Flash -type d -delete

--
Gary
~~~~
A straw vote only shows which way the hot air blows.
-- O'Henry

diskutil, look at the man page for options and examples.

I would try:
find /Volumes/Flash -exec rm {} \; (to delete all files)
find /Volumes/Flash -type d -exec rmdir {} \; (to delete all directories)

Mihalis.

You are right Gary.
Another possible variation may be
rm -rf `find -d /Volumes/Flash -type d`

Mihalis.