If you have an S3 bucket with a huge number of files, and you want to delete the bucket, you need to empty the bucket first. If the bucket has a handful of files, then it is easy enough from the AWS interface, but if the bucket has a large number of files, then AWS interface is not an option; and you must use s3cmd or may be some other tool which allows this.
s3cmd is a command-line tool for manipulating S3 buckets and objects; and as you would expect, it does have a way to recursively delete all objects in a bucket.
s3cmd del –recursive –force <bucket_url>
What’s annoying is that S3 does not provide this capability natively. The above command probably simply lists all the objects first internally; and then makes a delete call on each object.
It took me a while to figure this out, because it does not seem to be documented, I found this in one of the comments on S3cmd page.
-Deepak