On some systems (and for some terminal types), Emacs' use of the backspace key can be confusing. The backspace key may behave like the Delete key. You can fix this either by using this elisp in your ~/.emacs as follows:

(keyboard-translate ?\C-h ?\C-?)

This shell command may work if the elisp does not:

stty erase '^?'

I had 232,000 small text files to delete and they were going to take upward of 50 minutes to push them to the recycle bin by selecting them all and smacking the delete key. I canceled it and tried to shift-delete (delete the files, don't put them in the recycle bin). They were gone in 2-3 seconds.

Warning: When you delete files like this they're gone. The only way to get them back is to run an undelete utility.