Messages in this thread | | | Date | 10 Mar 2001 13:22:00 +0200 | From | (Kai Henningsen) | Subject | Re: Hashing and directories |
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billc@netcomuk.co.uk (Bill Crawford) wrote on 22.02.01 in <3A959BFD.B18F833@netcomuk.co.uk>:
> A particular reason for this, apart from filesystem efficiency, > is to make it easier for people to find things, as it is usually > easier to spot what you want amongst a hundred things than among > a thousand or ten thousand. > > A couple of practical examples from work here at Netcom UK (now > Ebone :), would be say DNS zone files or user authentication data. > We use Solaris and NFS a lot, too, so large directories are a bad > thing in general for us, so we tend to subdivide things using a > very simple scheme: taking the first letter and then sometimes > the second letter or a pair of letters from the filename. This > actually works extremely well in practice, and as mentioned above > provides some positive side-effects.
So the practical difference between finding a file in a hierarchy if you already know the first N characters (because you need them to find the subdirectory it's in), and finding the same file in a flat directory still knowing the first N characters, is ... well, maybe tab completion is a tad slower.
Sorry, but I can't see the human angle.
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