billions of files, ext3, reiser, and ls -aly

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Zu Zhihui wrote:

> 2007/1/30, Chris F.A. Johnson <cfaj-uVmiyxGBW52XDw4h08c5KA at public.gmane.org>:
>>
>>  On Mon, 29 Jan 2007, Byron Sonne wrote:
>> 
>> >  When I had a dir with a proverbial billion files in it, under reiser an
>> >  ls -al would throw an error like 'too many arguments'. I reinstalled my
>> >  system last night, converted to ext3, and now ls -al doesn't throw and
>> >  error anymore.
>> > 
>> >  If one were a betting person, would you be inclined to think the success
>> >  is due to (1) new file system or (2) modifications to the ls program?
>
> I think the reason is neither (1) nor (2). It's caused by glibc. If you
> modify glibc and re-compile the ls program, it should be ok.

   If the command is 'ls -al' you will not get a 'too many arguments'
   error, because there are not too many arguments; there are none
   besides the options. If you use 'ls -al *' you may, and it depends
   on the system (glibc may be part of it) and how many arguments (and
   possibly the maximum length of the arguments).

>    More likely you used a different command. If you just do 'ls -al',
>>      you would not get 'too many arguments'. If you do 'ls -al *' you
>>      will.

-- 
    Chris F.A. Johnson                      <http://cfaj.freeshell.org>
    ===================================================================
    Author:
    Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach (2005, Apress)
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