From owner-freebsd-hackers  Thu May 24 21:32:39 2001
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Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 14:32:26 +1000
From: Greg Black <gjb@gbch.net>
To: "Andrew Reilly" <areilly@bigpond.net.au>
Cc: "Andresen,Jason R." <jandrese@mitre.org>,
	void <float@firedrake.org>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: technical comparison 
References: <20010524082013.G88992-100000@nausicaa.mitre.org> <nospam-990735453.93235@maxim.gbch.net> <20010525142434.A55317@gurney.reilly.home> 
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	of Fri, 25 May 2001 14:24:34 +1000
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"Andrew Reilly" wrote:

| 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.
| 
| [...]
| 
| Nothing in Unix stops you from putting millions of files in a
| directory.

This is just not true.  For the vast majority of the systems
that have ever been called Unix, attempting to put millions of
files into a directory would be an utter disaster.  No ifs or
buts.  It might be nice if this were different, although I see
no good reason to support it myself, but it's generally not a
serious possibility and so applications that depend on being
able to do that are plain stupid.  Their authors are either too
lazy to make their use of the file system a bit more sensible or
too stupid to know that file systems are not databases.  The
right answer is to write applications with some understanding of
the basics of software engineering or computer science.

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