Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 16:40:35 +0300 From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr> To: Wayne McAlpine <wayne.mcalpine@home.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Question Message-ID: <20000413164035.A25700@hades.hell.gr> In-Reply-To: <001f01bfa4ca$8bfee4b0$bb15fea9@1wn.com>; from wayne.mcalpine@home.com on Wed, Apr 12, 2000 at 04:00:42PM -0600 References: <001f01bfa4ca$8bfee4b0$bb15fea9@1wn.com>
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On Wed, Apr 12, 2000 at 04:00:42PM -0600, Wayne McAlpine wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Would you happen to know what the maximunm amount of files and/or sub
> directories that one can have in any single directory on a freebsd
> ufs file system ? I'd really appreciate your response if you know the
> answer.
I suspect that for the number of files, there is no theoretical limit,
other than the limit of the available i-nodes on your filesystem. After
a truly huge number of files have been created in a single directory,
performance is likely to degrade though. Perhaps it all depends on what
will happen first: your filesystem run out of i-nodes, or performance
gonne that way...
However, for the nesting of subdirectories, there seems to be a limit.
I tried this:
$ cd /tmp
$ while true; do mkdir 0; cd 0; sleep 0; done
and waited to see whether it would stop or fill the rest of my /tmp
partition with empty directories [yeah, i know, i like living on the
dangerous side of the moon].
It stopped several levels down, and the last directory that my shell
(currently bash) would not give me the error:
cd: could not get current directory: getcwd: cannot access
parent directories: No such file or directory
was at a depth that I could see:
% pwd | wc
1 1 1023
One level deeper, bash would not chdir, pwd would fail, etc.
The limit seems to be that of a maximum pathname containing 1023
characters. I suspect POSIX has something to do with this :/
--
Giorgos Keramidas, < keramida @ ceid . upatras . gr >
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