Maximum number of inodes in a directory? [closed]

Answer 1

As noted by Rob Adams, ls is sorting the files before displaying them. Note that if you are using NFS, the NFS server will be sorting the directory before sending it, and 2 million entries may well take longer than the NFS timeout. That makes the directory unlistable via NFS, even with the -f flag.

This may be true for other network file systems as well.

While there's no enforced limit to the number of entries in a directory, it's good practice to have some limit to the entries you anticipate.

Answer 2

Maximum directory size is filesystem-dependent, and thus the exact limit varies. However, having very large directories is a bad practice.

You should consider making your directories smaller by sorting files into subdirectories. One common scheme is to use the first two characters for a first-level subdirectory, as follows:

${topdir}/aa/aardvark
${topdir}/ai/airplane

This works particularly well if using UUID, GUIDs or content hash values for naming.

Answer 3

Another option is find:

find . -name * -exec somcommands {} \;

{} is the absolute filepath.

The advantage/disadvantage is that the files are processed one after each other.

find . -name * > ls.txt

would print all filenames in ls.txt

find . -name * -exec ls -l {} \; > ls.txt

would print all information form ls for each file in ls.txt

Answer 4

df -i should tell you the number of inodes used and free on the file system.