Subj : hpt squish corruption
To   : Gerrit Kuehn
From : andrew clarke
Date : Thu Jun 07 2018 11:20:12

06 Jun 18 20:36, you wrote to me:

 ac>> *.MSG is another option, though access gets slower as your
 ac>> messagebase gets larger. Perhaps not noticably. Unlike the DOS
 ac>> days, lots of small files aren't such a problem on modern OSes.

 GK> I wouldn't bet on that one... it merely depends on what "lots of"
 GK> actually mean. Having a several k of files in one flat directory might
 GK> very well get you into trouble on modern OS and FS as well.

I would bet money on it.

Have you looked at the Maildir format used for email storage? It's supported by 
a whole bunch of software and works exactly the same way. One file per message. 
I use it here. It works well. Performance isn't necessarily stellar but can be 
improved by the software using intelligent caching. Modern OSes also perform 
filesystem caching which can help, too.

 GK> Might simply start with not easily being able to delete them anymore
 GK> on the commandline under *ix systems.

What? No. :-)

It's possible to delete ANY file (assuming filesystem permissions allow it) 
from the command-line on any Linux/BSD/OSX operating system released in the 
past 20 years, and I would bet money on it.

If you're referring to filename globbing done by the shell, then yes, this can 
be a problem if you reach the kernel's limit for the length of the command or 
number of arguments.

But the solution is just to not use command-line globbing. The usual way is 
with find:

find . -iname '*.msg' -delete

where find itself does the globbing (wildcard pattern matching).

In this case I'm using -iname to perform a case-insensitive search, since the 
files might be named 1.MSG, 2.MSG instead of 1.msg, 2.msg, etc.

-+- GoldED+/BSD 1.1.5-b20170303
* Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)
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 * Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)

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