oops... to many files and can't clean up...

Austin Godber plug-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us
Thu, 20 Jun 2002 21:55:30 -0700


Perhaps it is was a shell limitations since that would be what was
responsible for the regular expression expansion.  Sounds like most the
problems you had were when you used *.

Austin

"John (EBo) David" wrote:
> 
> sorry to reply to my own message, but a quick update...
> 
> I went to another xterm and tried get a second look at things.  From
> there I was able to see and remove the rest of the files (no idea what
> happend to that one xterm to muck with ls/rm).  Anyway, things are
> cleaned up, and that even seemed to fix things in the original xterm
> that was causing the problems...
> 
> I may well still reboot and FSCK...  Any idea what could have screwed
> up?  I remember that there used to be a limit of 10,000 files/directory
> or inode.  That is why I was originally concerned with having more than
> 2.5 times that in a single directory.
> 
>   EBo --
> 
> "John (EBo) David" wrote:
> >
> > ummm....
> >
> > I have a unit and regression test suite for my ecological modeling
> > virtual machine.  I needed to bump up one of the tests to run for a
> > longer time for model testing.  Problem was that I forgot that I am
> > creating an image dump for *every* variable specified each and every
> > iteration... start_time=0, stop_time=25, dt=0.01... that is 2,500 images
> > for umm... looks like 8 variables, and there are 15 other unit tests...
> >
> > So now I find that I have over 25,000 files in a single directory.
> > oops.  Ok, off to clean them up....
> >
> > First, ls and rm complain that there are to many files to "rm *.pgm", so
> > I go though and delete them by group name... ok, appears to go ok.  Now
> > I am finally able to "rm *.pgm" so they should be clean up.  Problem is
> > that once I do that I still have hundreds of pgm files in the directory
> > that "ls" reports, but an "ls *meta_pop*" does not.  I am affraid that I
> > have corrupted the file system or something.
> >
> > any suggestions?
> >
> > thoughts:
> >
> >   shut down the machine, reboot single user, fsck ever partition
> > (including XFS partions), and recite some prayer to Boolean...
> >
> > other ideas, thoughts, intuitions as to what happens when creating 10's
> > of thousands of files in a single directory by accident?
> >
> >   EBo --
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-- 
Austin Godber
godber@asu.edu
Rotten Philomathian