How to remove many (200 000) files?

$ find /path/to/folder -type f -delete

You are doing everything right. It is the '*' that gives you a problem (the shell is expanding it into list of files instead of the find). The right syntax could be:

cd <your_directory>; find . -type f | xargs rm -f
find <your_directory> -type f | xargs rm -f

(The latter is a bit less efficient since it will pass longer names to xargs, but you will hardly notice :-) )

Alternatively, you could escape your '*' like this (however in that case it will also try also remove "." and ".."; it is not a biggie - you will just get a little warning :-) ):

find . -name '*' | xargs rm -f
find . -name "*" | xargs rm -f
find . -name \* | xargs rm -f

If your file names contain spaces then use this:

find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 rm -f

The following command will delete all files from the current directory:

find . -type f -exec rm {} \;

you can try

find /path/to/folder -type f -print0  | xargs -0 rm -f

or

find /path/to/folder -type f -exec rm -f "{}" +

Kudos to quantas answer, here are some additions.

If you like to delete files with a particular name pattern you can write it like this. Also added -print so you can see what's happening as the files are being deleted.

sudo find /home/mydirectory -name "*.jpg" -type f -print -delete

This for instance deletes all jpegs in mydirectory.