Re: Directories with 2million files

> At 3:09 PM -0500 4/21/04, Eric Anderson wrote:
> >Garance A Drosihn wrote:
> >
> >>... If you really do want the -l (lowercase L)
> >>instead of -1 (digit one), it *might* help to add the -h option.
> >
> >Used 263MB, before  returning the correct number.. It's functional,
> >but only if you have a lot of ram.
>
> Darn.  Well, that was a bit of a long-shot, but worth a try.
>
> >>Another option is to use the `stat' command instead of `ls'.
> >>One advantage is that you'd have much better control over
> >>what information is printed.
> >
> >I'm not sure how to use stat to get that same info.
>
> Oops.  My fault.  I thought the `stat' command had an option to
> list all files in a given directory.  I guess you'd have to combine
> it with `find' to do that.
>
> >>>du does the exact same thing.
> >>
> >>Just a plain `du'?  If all you want is the total, did you
> >>try `du -s'?  I would not expect any problem from `du -s'.
> >
> >$ du -s
> >du: fts_read: Cannot allocate memory
>
> Huh.  Well, that seems pretty broken...
>
> >>>I'd work on some patches, but I'm not worth much when it comes
> >>>to C/C++.   If someone has some patches, or code to try, let me
> >>>know - I'd be more than willing to test, possibly even give out
> >>>an account on the machine.
> >>
> >>
> >>It is probably possible to make `ls' behave better in this
> >>situation, though I don't know how much of a special-case
> >>we would need to make it.
> >
> >
> >I suppose this is one of those "who needs files bigger than 2gb?"
> >things..
>
> Perhaps, but as a general rule we'd like our system utilities to
> at least *work* in extreme situations.  This is something I'd
> love to dig into if I had the time, but I'm not sure I have the
> time right now.

A quick inspection of the code (on my 4.9-REL-p2 machine) shows that there's
a memory leak.
The following malloc() does not have a matching free().  I looked at the
latest version in CVS (rev 1.76) and this hasn't been fixed.

    537                 /* Fill-in "::" as "0:0:0" for the sake of scanf. */
    538                 jinitmax = initmax2 = malloc(strlen(initmax) * 2 +
2);

We need to add a free() for this; here's my suggestion.

    596                 maxinode = makenines(maxinode);
    597                 maxblock = makenines(maxblock);
    598                 maxnlink = makenines(maxnlink);
    599                 maxsize = makenines(maxsize);
    600
    601                 free(jinitmax); /* MTE */
    602
    603         }

--
Matt Emmerton