Re: FTP limitation on directory size
- From: briggs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: 14 Dec 2006 07:06:14 -0600
In article <45814080_1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "David Biddulph" <groups@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
We are using Hummingbird FTP client (version 8.0.0.0) on a Windows XP
network to access files on an Alpha running VMS 7.1. We run into problems
when a directory on the Alpha gets too large, in that we can only see the
files in the early part of the alphabet.
I seem to remember someone talking in the past about some limitation on the
directory size for FTP to be able to see all the files. Can anyone tell me
what the limitation is, whether it is at the Windows client end or the VMS
end, and whether there is a solution? [As a short term fix in the past I
have copied files into a smaller directory, and the FTP could see them
there, but we'd like to know whether there is an option that can be fixed.]
It's certainly not a limitation of the FTP protocol. The directory
listing produced by LIST or NLST goes down a TCP stream and can be
of unbounded length. TCP sequence numbers are allowed to wrap -- you
could generate a directory listing of over 4 gigabytes and keep right
on going.
I would not expect it to be a limitation on the server side. And in
any case you haven't told us what server side software you're using.
The FTP server producing a directory listing can pretty well just use
an RMS $SEARCH loop and spit out a file name for each file. There
is nothing in any such approach that would impose a directory size limit.
A gui client, on the other hand... The client needs to parse the output
and store all the parsed file names so that it can create a [scrollable]
window containing the directory listing. It may even decide to sort the
files. There are some memory requirements involved with these things and
thus a plausible limitation on displayable directory size.
An easy way to test for this would be to use the command line FTP
client and see if it is affected in the same way. If not then your
problem is in the GUI client.
C:\> ftp vmsnode
ftp> cd big-directory
ftp> dir
[make sure that all the files show up]
.
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