Re: Do too many files hurt a directory?

From: Nick Landsberg (hukolau_at_NOSPAM.att.net)
Date: 03/26/04

  • Next message: Alan Connor: "Re: Help w/ vi command mode" 
    Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 22:22:01 GMT

    Charlie Gibbs wrote:

    >
    > :-) Actually, copying everything into a new directory did the
    > trick. The system is now as snappy as it ever was. Many thanks
    > to you all.
    >
    > As an interesting postscript, when I dialed back into the system
    > I was still logged in (I've already pointed out to them what a
    > security hole it is to not log someone out when the connection
    > drops), and it was very strange to find myself in a directory
    > that had been unlinked. Most commands died immediately, complaining
    > about an invalid directory, and pwd returned a completely blank line.
    > When I logged out and back in again, everything was back to normal.
    >

    Hey! You were on the right track even without our help. :)

    Your postscript is very interesting. I've never encountered
    that behavior before. Then, I haven't ever been logged
    in to a directory which is removed out from under my feet. :)

    The fact that pwd would return a blank line is easily
    explained. It tries to open "." in order to look up
    it's inode number and and then tries to open ".." and
    search the directory for the same inode number, and repeats
    the operation up the full path. (At least it used to in the old
    days.)

    Regarding the other commands, I'm not surprised that some
    failed, but surprised that *only* some failed. It used to
    be that the kernel kept a record of the current directory
    for each process as part of the process information. Thus
    your shell would have an invalid entry for the current
    directory associated with it. Any commands you ran would
    also inherit this invalid information. I wonder why some succeeded,
    but that's a question to ponder another time. 

    -- 
"It is impossible to make anything foolproof
because fools are so ingenious"
  - A. Bloch
  • Next message: Alan Connor: "Re: Help w/ vi command mode"

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