From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Apr 21 13:51:52 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 25FD016A4CE for ; Wed, 21 Apr 2004 13:51:52 -0700 (PDT) Received: from otter3.centtech.com (moat3.centtech.com [207.200.51.50]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DCBA643D53 for ; Wed, 21 Apr 2004 13:51:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from anderson@centtech.com) Received: from centtech.com (neutrino.centtech.com [10.177.171.220]) by otter3.centtech.com (8.12.3/8.12.3) with ESMTP id i3LKppE8067131; Wed, 21 Apr 2004 15:51:51 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from anderson@centtech.com) Message-ID: <4086DEDA.5000907@centtech.com> Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 15:51:38 -0500 From: Eric Anderson User-Agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 (X11/20040406) X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: masta@wifibsd.org References: <40867A5D.9010600@centtech.com> <4086D513.9010605@centtech.com> <4086DDA1.3080401@linuxpowered.com> In-Reply-To: <4086DDA1.3080401@linuxpowered.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org cc: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: Directories with 2million files X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 20:51:52 -0000 masta wrote: > Garance A Drosihn wrote: > >> At 3:09 PM -0500 4/21/04, Eric Anderson wrote: >> >>> Garance A Drosihn wrote: >>> >>> I suppose this is one of those "who needs files bigger than 2gb?" >>> things.. >> >> >> >> Perhaps, but as a general rule we'd like our system utilities to >> at least *work* in extreme situations. This is something I'd >> love to dig into if I had the time, but I'm not sure I have the >> time right now. >> > I'm not sure how we can improve this situation. Considering that an > `ls -l` is forced to stat every file, and store that info until the > time comes to dump it to the tty for the human operator. The problem > seems somewhat geometric, and un-fixable unless you want to find a way > to page out the stat information of each file to a dump file of some > sort, then cat that info back to the operator upon conclusion of the > main loop. Even then, list 2 million files will be excesive just > storing the file names for display. Bare minimum - du should work, if you ask me. ls is almost a separate issue - the only time you need to 'ls' a directory with that many files is maybe if you needed to use them in a script I suppose. I did it out of curiousity mostly, but du is an essential tool in this case.. Eric -- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Anderson Sr. Systems Administrator Centaur Technology Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. ------------------------------------------------------------------