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Date:      Thu, 13 Apr 2000 18:22:39 -0400
From:      Walter Brameld <brameld@twave.net>
To:        keramida@ceid.upatras.gr, Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@ceid.upatras.gr>, Wayne McAlpine <wayne.mcalpine@home.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Question
Message-ID:  <00041318422101.02132@Bozo_3.BozoLand.domain>
In-Reply-To: <20000413164035.A25700@hades.hell.gr>
References:  <001f01bfa4ca$8bfee4b0$bb15fea9@1wn.com> <20000413164035.A25700@hades.hell.gr>

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On Thu, 13 Apr 2000, in a never-ending search for enlightenment, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> 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 >

Please don't forget my newbie status, but after seeing this question
and a previous one on number of available inodes I thought I'd pass
this along from 'man newfs'.

The characters of interest are:

1) blocksize -  Block size of the file system. The value must be a power
    of 2, the default is 8192 bytes and the smallest allowable size is
    4096 bytes. 
2) fragsize - The fragment size of the file system. Also a power of 2
    in the range of blocksize/8 and blocksize. Default is 1024 bytes.
3) bytes-per-inode. The default is to create an inode for every
    (4 * fragsize) bytes of data space.

Using the command 'df -i' will show you how many inodes you have used,
and how many are still available.

-- 
Walter Brameld

Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
Linux:     Where do you want to go tomorrow?
BSD:       Are you guys coming, or what?
Walter:    And what does THIS button do??



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