Re: FYI: a 256,000,000-byte file name

[James Youngman]

On Sun, Dec 04, 2005 at 08:02:16PM +0100, Jim Meyering wrote:
> Just to prove I could do it, I constructed a hierarchy 1 million
> (and one) levels deep, with each directory name being 255 bytes long.
> Then I made sure that GNU rm could remove it.  Since I didn't
> want to wait forever, I created it on a Linux/tmpfs file system.
> It took a little over 2 minutes, with a little thrashing.
> I vaguely recall seeing that rm's working set was around 400MB.

Congratulations.  I remember doing the exervises from W. Richard
Stevens book and writing a program to find out how deep a directory
hierarchy my system could manage (naturally, the answer is that the
real limit is the number of free inodes).  I then tried removing the
monster directory hierarchy with rm, with no success.  I ended up
writing a second program to delete the directory hierarchy.

I wonder if 'ftsfind . -depth -delete' would work for this purpose also.

Thanks,
James.