Re: Memory limitation of 'find'

[P Fudd]

Hello again;

The latest version of find works.

Thanks!

On Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:19:01 +0100
James Youngman <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 1:56 AM, P Fudd <address@hidden> wrote:
> > Hello!
> >
> > Thanks for writing find, I use it daily.
> >
> > Recently, I've had to use find on unusual filesystems.
> >  Specifically, filesystems containing directories with 35,000 files
> > in them, with each filename being 11 characters long.
> >
> > Example:
> >  $ ls -f chromat_dir | wc -l
> >  35234
> >  $ mkdir /tmp/foo; cp chromat_dir/* /tmp/foo
> >  /bin/cp: Argument list too long.
> >  $ find chromat_dir > /dev/null
> >  find: chromat_dir: Cannot allocate memory
> >  $
> >
> > Is there a way to remove the memory limitation?  The computer has 16
> > gigs of ram; allocating 387k shouldn't cause it to choke like this.
> 
> You are right.   find should have no problem descending directory
> hierarchies hundreds of thousands of levels deep and containing tens
> or hundreds of millions of files.
> 
> If this problem exists still, it needs to be fixed.   First, please
> check with a recent version of findutils; the version you are using
> was released over five years ago.   You can find up-to-date versions
> of findutils at ftp.gnu.org.
> 
> If you try this with a recent version of find and discover there is
> still a problem, please investigate with some kind of system call
> tracer; I'd be interested in the operations leading up to and (less
> so) immediately following the ENOMEM error.
> 
> Thanks,
> James.