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

[Tomas Hruby <thruby@few.vu.nl>]

On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 10:35:56AM -0700, Chris Wedgwood wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 08:54:35AM -0400, Theodore Tso wrote:
> 
> > I've heard reports of programs that attempt to optimize recursive
> > descents by counting the number of directories found so far and
> > comparing it with st_nlinks.
> 
> Some versions of find do this.  Breaking these semantics I think would
> be painful for some people.

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? 

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 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?

		Tomas