xanthian@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG (Kent Paul Dolan) (11/11/90)
Well, this one was unexpected, and I'm not sure if it counts as a bug or
not.
I was out of things to do in the wee hours, and decided to take care
of my monthly mail sort. I keep all my email sorted by user id, and,
with a new hard disk, I could do it all at once, instead of one initial
letter at a time.
So, I unpacked all my 26 plus a couple .lzh archives of mail into a
directory, about 1340 files in all. I did a "dir", and it worked OK,
though it took a minute or two on a very fast disk.
Then I unpacked my new mail. Lots of new correspondents, so with merging
and adding, I ended up with around 1760 files in a single directory. I tried
"dir" again. Whirr, flash, whirr, flash for a while and then, paraphrased:
"Insufficient free store, listing incomplete", and no further output.
So, since I'm running a 9.5 megabyte real memory Amiga 2000, WS1.3, KS1.2,
I have to assume someone at CBM built a fixed length buffer into "dir"
for accumulating and sorting directory entries.
Naughty.
Didn't really hurt much, since I long ago built a script and a little
Modula-2 program that uses "list", "sort", my "column_set", and "more"
to display a more compact, pageable listing of files set in as many
columns as will fit across a screen, but it was a bit of a surprise.
Still, at least the file system is robust enough to support a large
number of files in a directory. Too bad the support utilities aren't
also up to the task.
/// It's Amiga
/// for me: why
Kent, the man from xanth. \\\/// settle for
<xanthian@Zorch.SF-Bay.ORG> <xanthian@well.sf.ca.us> \XX/ anything less?
--
Convener, ongoing comp.sys.amiga grand reorganization.