Re: Hashing and directories

[kaih@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen)]

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.


MfG Kai