Directories with 2million files

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 3:09 PM -0500 4/21/04, Eric Anderson wrote:
>Garance A Drosihn wrote:
>
>>... If you really do want the -l (lowercase L)
>>instead of -1 (digit one), it *might* help to add the -h option.
>
>Used 263MB, before  returning the correct number.. It's functional,
>but only if you have a lot of ram.

Darn.  Well, that was a bit of a long-shot, but worth a try.

>>Another option is to use the `stat' command instead of `ls'.
>>One advantage is that you'd have much better control over
>>what information is printed.
>
>I'm not sure how to use stat to get that same info.

Oops.  My fault.  I thought the `stat' command had an option to
list all files in a given directory.  I guess you'd have to combine
it with `find' to do that.

>>>du does the exact same thing.
>>
>>Just a plain `du'?  If all you want is the total, did you
>>try `du -s'?  I would not expect any problem from `du -s'.
>
>$ du -s
>du: fts_read: Cannot allocate memory

Huh.  Well, that seems pretty broken...

>>>I'd work on some patches, but I'm not worth much when it comes
>>>to C/C++.   If someone has some patches, or code to try, let me
>>>know - I'd be more than willing to test, possibly even give out
>>>an account on the machine.
>>
>>
>>It is probably possible to make `ls' behave better in this
>>situation, though I don't know how much of a special-case
>>we would need to make it.
>
>
>I suppose this is one of those "who needs files bigger than 2gb?"
>things..

Perhaps, but as a general rule we'd like our system utilities to
at least *work* in extreme situations.  This is something I'd
love to dig into if I had the time, but I'm not sure I have the
time right now.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu