Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 01:22:33 +1000 From: Tim Robbins <tjr@freebsd.org> To: Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com> Cc: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Directories with 2million files Message-ID: <20040421152233.GA23501@cat.robbins.dropbear.id.au> In-Reply-To: <40867A5D.9010600@centtech.com> References: <40867A5D.9010600@centtech.com>
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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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