ZFS: Destroy or remove one or more filesystems

Contributed by qmchenry June 6, 2006  
Tagged: Solaris system administration

If you no longer want a filesystem or hierarchy of filesystems, ZFS offers a (possibly too) easy mechanism for removing them. The destroy option of the zfs command unshares, unmounts, and obliterates filesystems.

To destroy the single filesystem techrx/home/davak, use

zfs destroy techrx/home/davak


As long as the filesystem is not in use (as when it is your current working directory), and has no decendent filesystems, snapshots, or clones under it, the filesystem will be no more. Because it makes these checks, this is the safest way to destroy ZFS filesystems.

A more dangerous option exists that will recursively destroy child filesystems defined under the target filesystem. While this is handy on a development or testing system, its use in a production environment is unwise. To remove the techrx filesystem and all descendent filesystems:

zfs destroy -r techrx


Descendent clones and snapshots will still cause the command to bail. To destroy the filesystems without regards to those, make it a capital -R option.

Editorial note: A courteous user pointed out an error in the second example in which ‘remove’ was substituted unintentionally for ‘destroy.’ This error has been fixed. Thanks for your help!