Re: ext2/3 subdirectory limit [WAS: Choosing and tuning Linux file systems]

[Chris Wedgwood <cw@f00f.org>]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 11:03:57PM +0200, Tomas Hruby wrote:

> So if I have a directory where the nlink does not correspond with
> then number of subdirectories, the applications you mentined don't
> work correctly?

yes

> As Ted said, not all fiel systems follow this. This means that such
> applications cannot e.g., remove a directory (rm -r) from such a FS?

i don't know about rm, but some versions of find need -noleaf (see the
man page for details)

> I am asking because we have an issue that an older version of mc
> cannot remove directory recursively, however we have not observed
> this on any new system. Might the nlink count be the problem?

i'm not seen the nlink problem occur because pretty much all
filesystems have nlink set correctly *or* they set it to one like
autofs does which happens to work because 1-2-n underflows (there are
also those who claim that nlink==1 implies you don't know how many
links there are)