Problem, I have a directory with 188,692 equally sized files in it, taking up 9GB of space on an ext3 file system.

When will this crash? How would you go about moving files out of this directory and into others safely?

I try to look into the directory from samba and the client machine gets 100 cpu usage and hangs there for like 10 minutes.

Use df -M to see if you're running out of space in the filesystem and df -i to see if you're running out of inodes. top will show you which processes consume cpu and memory.

Thanks for the help!
I don't have the option of df -M, but I used df -h to see how much I had left. What does the -M option do?

when i did df -i this is what I received for the device the directory is on.
Filesystem Inodes IUsed IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 3.2M 399K 2.8M 13% /

That means I should be good to go for a long time correct? I shouldn't worry about having too many files in one directory (300,000+ files)?

Is there any danger of crashing the system while moving the files out of this directory?

If the previous posting was a complete listing:

It would seem that you only have one partition on your machine.

If this is the case, are the majority of these files in on directory?

This would cause an overhead with the client machine trying to get the information of all of these files to provide a directory list and would most likely be the cause of the "hang"

As a test, create a directory called example: mkdir example

List the latest 1000 files and copy them to example (note this creates duplicates of these files):

Then on your samba client look at the example directory and see how long it takes to compile the list.

Assuming this takes a short while to come back, I would suggest you have a period of organisation ahead of you.

Hope this helps

Sorry,

Just saw a bug in my example!

ls -lt will cause errors

try ls on it's own!

Yes I'm sure the hang was caused by windows weak ability to handle a large directory list. (yay for them!)

The hang up it caused has made me afraid to even go into the directory through the shell and do a simple "ls" for fear or bringing the server down. Should I have anything to be afraid of?

what about "ls -rt" ?

what does "ls | head -1000" do?

OK

LS (in lower case) is the Unix/Linux command to list files in a directory (equivilant to dir), so you would need to do my suggestion on the Samba file server itself (not from the client machine)

ls | head -1000

redirects the output of LS to the command HEAD. The charecter in between is called a pipe, and would be shown on your keyboard as a line with a gap in the middle.

The head command takes the first 1000 entries from the previous command.

These can then be passed to the next command:

while read v_file

This starts a while do done loop and reads input into the v_file variable for each loop

cp -p $v_file example/.

copies the file stored in the v_file parameter to the directory example calling the file the same name and keeping the ownership security permissions and timedate stamp information from the original file.

Disillusionist
You're script is the best! Do you have a good book to recommend for /bin/sh scripts? I am pretty good with perl so I figure the oreilly books sould be pretty good right?

Yep, I tend to go with O'Reilly books.

Probably one of the best alround books is "Unix Power Tools"

This covers:
* the various types of scripting languages available (including bourne, c, korn and perl)
* powerful utilities like sed and awk
* text editors (vi and emacs)

and much more.

It even has the best part of a chapter dedicated to working with Samba.

It's quite a chunky book but well worth it!

what distro is colinux ?

colinux is "Cooperative Linux"

Check out their site on www.colinux.org

Basically, it allows you to run a linux kernel from within the Windows Operating System