Linux/Solaris has any limit on folder size ? Post: 37774

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Linux/Solaris has any limit on folder size ? Post 37774 by Perderabo on Saturday 28th of June 2003 09:23:17 AM

06-28-2003

Administrator Emeritus

I can speak with some authority about Solaris and I'm sure that linux is very similiar.

In the Unix world, we use the term directory rather than folder. The difference is important. You literally put a document in a folder, but you only put the name of a document in a directory. Once a document is in a folder, it can't also be in a second folder. But you can list the name of a document in as many directories as you want.

To fit a file into a directory, we must have room for the name of the file. But the size of the file is irrelevant.

In Unix, a directory contains a name and a inode number for every file in it. So how big can this list be? The max file size comes into play here. After all, a directory is a file itself. Under early versions of Solaris, the max file size was 2 Gb. Recent versions of Solaris now support large files. Large files are 8,589,934,592 Gb in theorical length but there is no way to attach enough disk drives to a computer to allow creation of such a large file.

But even with small files, if we say that a typical file name is 20 bytes long together with 4 bytes for the inode, then we can get 2147483648 /24 = 89,478,485 files in a directory. With smaller file names, you could up that a bit.

This however would be a very dumb thing to do. Directories are searched sequentially. Very large directories drag down system performance. I try to keep all of my directories under 1000 files.

The largest directory that I ever saw had about 130,000 files in it. Manipulating it was painful.

Perderabo

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LEARN ABOUT OSF1

rmf

rmf(1)							      General Commands Manual							    rmf(1)

NAME

       rmf - remove folder (only available within the message handling system, mh)

SYNOPSIS

       rmf [+folder] [-help] [-[no]interactive]

OPTIONS

       Prints  a  list of the valid options to this command.  Asks for confirmation before deleting a folder. By default, rmf deletes a folder and
       its messages without asking for confirmation.  If you specify the -interactive option, rmf asks if you are sure before deleting the folder.
       You are advised to use this option, since when rmf deletes a folder its contents are lost irretrievably.

DESCRIPTION

       The  rmf  command  removes all of the messages within the current folder, and then removes the folder itself. If there are any files within
       the folder which are not part of MH, they are not removed, and an error message is displayed.

       You can specify a folder other than the current folder by using the +folder argument. If you do not specify a folder, and rmf  cannot  find
       the current folder,rmf asks you whether you want to delete +inbox instead.

       If the current folder is removed, it makes +inbox current.

       Note that the rmf command irreversibly deletes messages that do not have other links, so use it with caution.

       If  the	folder	being removed is a sub-folder, the parent folder becomes the new current folder, and rmf tells you that this has happened.
       This provides an easy mechanism for selecting a set of messages, operating on the list, then removing the list and returning to the current
       folder from which the list was extracted.

       Using  rmf  to  delete a read-only folder deletes the private sequence and current message information from the file, without affecting the
       folder itself. If you have sub-folders within a folder, you must delete all the sub-folders before you can delete the folder itself.

PROFILE COMPONENTS

       Path: To determine the user's Mail directory

EXAMPLES

       This example shows how rmf asks for confirmation when the -interactive option is used: % rmf -interactive +test Remove folder "test"? y

FILES

       The user profile.

SEE ALSO

       rmm(1)

																	    rmf(1)