Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!usc!apple!vsi1!zorch!xanthian From: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech Subject: File system abuse -- execeeding the design limits of "dir" Message-ID: <1990Nov11.152242.9623@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> Date: 11 Nov 90 15:22:42 GMT Sender: xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) Organization: SF-Bay Public-Access Unix Lines: 37 Well, this one was unexpected, and I'm not sure if it counts as a bug or not. I was out of things to do in the wee hours, and decided to take care of my monthly mail sort. I keep all my email sorted by user id, and, with a new hard disk, I could do it all at once, instead of one initial letter at a time. So, I unpacked all my 26 plus a couple .lzh archives of mail into a directory, about 1340 files in all. I did a "dir", and it worked OK, though it took a minute or two on a very fast disk. Then I unpacked my new mail. Lots of new correspondents, so with merging and adding, I ended up with around 1760 files in a single directory. I tried "dir" again. Whirr, flash, whirr, flash for a while and then, paraphrased: "Insufficient free store, listing incomplete", and no further output. So, since I'm running a 9.5 megabyte real memory Amiga 2000, WS1.3, KS1.2, I have to assume someone at CBM built a fixed length buffer into "dir" for accumulating and sorting directory entries. Naughty. Didn't really hurt much, since I long ago built a script and a little Modula-2 program that uses "list", "sort", my "column_set", and "more" to display a more compact, pageable listing of files set in as many columns as will fit across a screen, but it was a bit of a surprise. Still, at least the file system is robust enough to support a large number of files in a directory. Too bad the support utilities aren't also up to the task. /// It's Amiga /// for me: why Kent, the man from xanth. \\\/// settle for \XX/ anything less? -- Convener, ongoing comp.sys.amiga grand reorganization.