[buug] big/huge directories, standards, Ubuntu, pi, oh my! ...

[Michael Paoli]

So, a small sampling of interesting discussions, etc. from recent BUUG
meetings - and yes, BUUG meets again this evening, per usual.  :-)

2014-02-20 meeting, among other things, we discussed big/huge
directories on Unix/Linux filesytems, that for most filesystems
directories only grow, and never shrink, and other interesting bits.

2014-03-06 meeting, among other things, we discussed standards,
including POSIX, LSB, Single Unix Specification, some bits of related
history, etc.

2014-03-20 meeting - yes, today.  Dear knows who will show up (well,
other than me) and what we'll discuss, but it's generally interesting.
Agenda, what agenda, I thought you brought it?  Yes, BUUG is general
(Unix, Linux, BSD, ...) discussion, we don't lock ourselves in to
particular discussions or presentations or the like in advance.  And
sometimes quite interesting folks just drop in on us, often very
unexpectedly.  Oh, and today, also we have Ubuntu Hour Berkeley with us
at BUUG from 7:30pm-8:30pm:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam/Projects/UbuntuHours
http://loco.ubuntu.com/teams/ubuntu-california/events/
And still have some books/publications to give away:
http://buug.org/pipermail/buug/2014-February/004035.html
though at present down to one print (Ubuntu) book left, and electronic
editions.  And I might talk today a bit about Raspberry Pi.

Wee bit more details.
Big/huge directories - don't try this at hom^Wwork.  I should eventually
get it more fully written up, but did a bit more testing/experimenting.
Biggest directory I've ever encountered ... yet.  Took a friggin' long
time to create it, and I intentionally targeted slightly larger than the
largest I'd ever encountered prior.  Just a sneak preview - and this was
only part of the run to create it (did it in several stages):
$ (cd ext2/d && time perl -e 'my $n=3148166; my $f=$n; my $fh; while (  
(stat(q(.)))[7] < 111738880 ){link($f,++$n)||(($f=$n) &&  
open($fh,q(>),$f) && close($fh))||die;};print("$n\n");')
6986086

real    12054m54.306s
user    1m26.261s
sys     11982m29.116s
$
And how big?:
$ ls -dls ext?/d
109550 drwx------ 2 michael users 111738880 Mar 20 05:42 ext2/d
$
Anyway, more on that later.

Oh, and standards, standards:
"POSIX" / Single Unix Specification /
The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7 /
IEEE Std 1003.1, 2013 Edition:
http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
LSB:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb/