Directories with 2million files
Tim Robbins
tjr at freebsd.org
Wed Apr 21 07:19:32 PDT 2004
On Wed, Apr 21, 2004 at 08:42:53AM -0500, Eric Anderson wrote:
> First, let me say that I am impressed (but not shocked) - FreeBSD
> quietly handled my building of a directory with 2055476 files in it.
> I'm not sure if there is a limit to this number, but at least we know it
> works to 2million. I'm running 5.2.1-RELEASE.
>
> However, several tools seem to choke on that many files - mainly ls and
> du. Find works just fine. Here's what my directory looks like (from
> the parent):
>
> drwxr-xr-x 2 anderson anderson 50919936 Apr 21 08:25 data
>
> and when I cd into that directory, and do an ls:
>
> $ ls -al | wc -l
> ls: fts_read: Cannot allocate memory
> 0
The problem here is likely to be that ls is trying to store all the
filenames in memory in order to sort them. Try using the -f option
to disable sorting. If you really do need a sorted list of filenames,
pipe the output through 'sort'.
Tim
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