On 11/4/2006 2:21 PM, Jim Perrin wrote:
Does this number vary depending on the architecture used?
Not sure. I've only got x86 boxen to work with and test on for now. There is no limit (beyond inode limitations) on files on a filesystem or in a directory. There *is* a limit on directories in a directory.
I share your statement partly, because ...
mkdir ~/tmp (because doing this in an important dir is probably a bad idea) for i in {1..63000} ; do mkdir $i ; done
... this was limited up to 31998 directories in an ext3 fs. mkdir: cannot create directory `31999': Too many links mkdir: cannot create directory `32000': Too many links and so on...
I tested the same thing on an xfs fs and the interesting thing was that I got further... Creating {1..63000} wasn't any problem, I also added these dirs in the same directory without a prob: for i in {1..63000} ; do mkdir abc${i} ; done for i in {1..63000} ; do mkdir def${i} ; done I didn't want to spend more time on testing. It took me a whole lotta time to delete that stuff. ;-) Maybe under xfs directories just are limited by inodes and nothing else.
Both cases, ext3 and xfs, were tested on an x86_64 (Dual xeon). cya Michael