Re: Large number of files in single directory

"Chris" <redhat-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> · Wed, 25 May 2005 10:41:03 -0700

Tom - forget the "by character" method... my message below has a one-liner 
you can use to do the same thing on very large directories.  I'm trying to 
do something similar with tarring large directories, without having to 
resort to splitting things up into multiple files based on filenames (not 
always practical, especially if you try to automate things and don't know 
what the filenaming convention is... files may as well all start with the 
same character for all I know)

Anyone?

Chris

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Burke, Thomas G." <tg.burke@xxxxxxx>

Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 10:28 AM

Subject: RE: Large number of files in single directory

I delete them by character...  e.g. rm -rf *1.tmp, rm -rf *2.tmp, and so 
on.  Don't know of any other way to do it. - although I wrote a little C 
program once to handle it for me.

   -Tom

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 1:19 PM
Subject: Large number of files in single directory

There seems to be a filesystem limitation on most flavors of Linux I've

worked on, in terms of a max number of files in a single directory - 
before

tools like tar, gzip, rm, mv, cp and others stop working properly.  For

example, I have some users that have 2000+ files in a single directory 
(some

as many as 10,000 files) and trying to tar these directories is always

coming up with "argument list too long."

Is there a way for tar and these other tools to "see" all these files and
process them as normal?  I recall once I had to resort to something like
"find . -print | xargs rm -fr" to remove thousands of files from a single
directory.  Is doing something similar but replacing "rm" with "tar" the
only way to make this work, or does tar have some sort of command line
switch (I couldn't find one) to work with extremely long argument lists?

Chris 

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