On Tue, 6 Dec 2016 06:08 pm, Gregory Ewing wrote: >> And if there's an error in an option, you may have to abort, which means >> throwing away that list of files which, in some cases, can run into >> millions. > > This "millions of files" thing seems to be an imaginary > monster you've invented to try to scare people. I claim > that, to a very good approximation, it doesn't exist. > I've never encountered a directory containing a million > files, and if such a thing existed, it would be pathological > in enough other ways to make it a really bad idea.
I didn't read Bart's "millions" as *literally* 2*10**6 or more, I read it as "a very large number of files". But it is conceivable that it is millions. ReiserFS can apparently handle up to approximately 4 billion files in a single directory; even FAT32 can take up to 268 million files in total, although there is a per-directory limit of 65535. Here's a true story of a fellow who ended up with 8 million files in a single directory: http://be-n.com/spw/you-can-list-a-million-files-in-a-directory-but-not-with-ls.html There are system dependent limits on globbing expansion and the number of arguments you can pass to a program: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4185017/maximum-number-of-bash-arguments-max-num-cp-arguments http://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/various/argmax/ -- Steve “Cheer up,” they said, “things could be worse.” So I cheered up, and sure enough, things got worse. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
