[ralph]

This Perl beats rsync by quite a margin here.

    perl -e 'opendir D, "."; @f = grep {$_ ne "." && $_ ne ".."} readdir D;
        unlink(@f) == $#f + 1 or die'

It goes a bit quicker still if @f and the error handling are omitted.

The original article is comparing different things some of the time, e.g. find is having to stat(2) everything to test if it's a file.

[psutor]

I use perl for this as well.

  perl -e 'chdir "/var/session" or die; opendir D, ".";
      while ($f = readdir D) { unlink $f }'

It is very efficient memory-wise compared to the other options as well as being much faster. It is also easy to apply filters as you would with -mtime or such in find, just change the end statement to:

  { if (-M $f > 30) {unlink $f} }

to affect files modified more than 30 days ago.

[ralph]

It's not that I'd use Perl for the task, just that I don't think rsync is special. Indeed, rsync has the overhead of forking a child and communicating empty/'s bareness.