Re: Do too many files hurt a directory?

From: Charlie Gibbs (cgibbs_at_kltpzyxm.invalid)
Date: 03/30/04 

Date: 30 Mar 04 09:18:45 -0800

In article <vq0ac.64896$PY1.1186266@bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>
hukolau@NOSPAM.att.net (Nick Landsberg) writes:

>Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>
>> In article
>> <Yh59c.24304$tY6.703172@bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>
>> hukolau@NOSPAM.att.net (Nick Landsberg) writes:
>>
>>>The process which created all those files is
>>>downright dangerous! You would probably be
>>>doing your client a favor if you tracked it
>>>down and filed a MAJOR trouble report with the
>>>vendor. (And charged appropriately for the tracking
>>>down, etc.)
>>
>> That's easy. I wrote it. :-) It's a sort utility; I still
>> don't know how it ran off creating all those files, but this
>> problem was just one of many that resulted from the customer
>> running our application as root instead of under the proper
>> user ID. (All the files belonged to root, but fortunately
>> the directory still belonged to the original user so I was
>> able to delete them with rm -f.)
>
>Whoops! Then I guess you can't charge for
>fixing it! :)

Why not? It works for Microsoft... :-)

The odd thing is that this version is dated November 30, 1998.
It's been running in dozens of Unix installations (and an MS-DOS
version has been running in a couple of thousand MS-DOS and Windows
installations) several times a day ever since, and there's never
been a sign of this sort of behaviour. 

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