Re: How many directories can I have ?

From: Barry Margolin (barmar_at_alum.mit.edu)
Date: 10/26/04 

Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 20:23:05 -0400

In article <c99d2c79.0410251534.65a50464@posting.google.com>,
 see_my_signature_for_my_real_address@hotmail.com (Dr. David Kirkby)
 wrote:

> I have a Sun SPARC 20 running Solaris 9, fitted with a 9 GB disk. How
> many directories am I likely to be able to create on a file system
> before running out of inodes, or inducing other problems? I suspect
> there will be some limit that cuts in before disk space is exhausted.
>
> I know a few years ago seeing some odd warnings from a sytem at work
> which looked to me like a hardware failure. I emailed the sytem admin,
> who replied he thought the system was out of inodes. I can't recall
> what the symptons were, but it made me a little concerned yesterday,
> when I had a need to create 10000 or so directories.

There's no particular limit to directories. They use the same pool of
inodes as other files. If a filesystem has 10,000 inodes, you could
have 5,000 directories and 5,000 files, 1,000 directories and 9,000
files, or even 9,000 directories and 1,000 files (in this case, most of
the directories will probably be empty, unless the files have hard links
in several different directories). 

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***

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