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
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 15 2001 - 21:00:11 EST