From owner-freebsd-hackers  Thu May 24 21:24:43 2001
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From: "Andrew Reilly" <areilly@bigpond.net.au>
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 14:24:34 +1000
To: Greg Black <gjb@gbch.net>
Cc: "Andresen,Jason R." <jandrese@mitre.org>,
	void <float@firedrake.org>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: technical comparison
Message-ID: <20010525142434.A55317@gurney.reilly.home>
References: <20010524082013.G88992-100000@nausicaa.mitre.org> <nospam-990735453.93235@maxim.gbch.net>
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In-Reply-To: <nospam-990735453.93235@maxim.gbch.net>; from gjb@gbch.net on Fri, May 25, 2001 at 06:17:33AM +1000
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On Fri, May 25, 2001 at 06:17:33AM +1000, Greg Black wrote:
> the life of all users of the system simpler.  There's no real
> excuse for directories with millions (or even thousands) of
> files.

One of the things that I've always liked about Unix was that
there aren't as many arbitrary limits on what you can do and how
you can do it, as there are on other platforms.

For example, I once used an Acorn Archimedes computer, which had
an OS called RISC-OS.  The "advanced disk filing system", ADFS,
had some cute limits built in: no more than 10 characters in a
file name, and no more than 70 (?memory fades) files in a
directory.

Nothing in Unix stops you from putting millions of files in a
directory.  There are (I mantain _obviously_) good reasons to
want to do that.  The only thing that stops you is that _some_
Unix platforms, using _some_ file systems, behave badly if you
do that.

They should be fixed.

-- 
Andrew

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