Re: getting absolute directory path?

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:42:52 -0700 (PDT), lawpoop@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Apr 28, 1:25 pm, "Peter H. Coffin" <hell...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Generally, you'll run out of patience trying to maintain large numbers
of files before you'll run out of room in a single directory.

What would be an example scenario that would try my patience? If it's
editing anything more than 3 files, I'm using command line tools such
as grep, find, bash scripts, or command line perl, rather than doing
it by hand. What would I be able to do to 10 files that would give me
a problem at 10,000? I'll wait 10 seconds instead of less than 1 for
my command to finish when I have 10,000 files.

Shell filename globbing frequently expands into a list of filenames that
are stored in the command buffer, which generally has SOME kind of a
cap. Mostly I've seen 32k, but that'll vary. If your list of filenames
expands out past the cap, you'll get an "Arguement list too long" error
and nothing will happen. find(1) works around that, but it allows
operations on files individually, not as aggregate.

I run out of patience trying to delve through a crazy directory tree
that's more than three directories wide or deep. There's no easy way
to tell a command line script to ignore certain subdirectories and
apply a function on others. At least, none that I know of.

If it ever gets to the point where some site is more than 10,000
individual php files, well, I'd like to see someone develop that.
Chances are, there is tremendous redundancy in that site, and the
number of files could be greatly reduced. However, if you really do
need 10,000 php pages for this application, LAMP or WAMP is probably
not the proper tool for the job.

Some utilities may have trouble dealing with large numbers of files at once,
so operations of every file in a directory may fail.

On a unix system? I doubt it.

See above about "Arguement list too long".

No utility works on a large number of files "at once". It goes through
each file individually, one at a time.

What's the term for a statement that's technically true but irrelevant?

--
We're the technical experts. We were hired so that management could
ignore our recommendations and tell us how to do our jobs.
-- Mike Andrews
.

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