Re: IFS "brick wall" limit on subdirectories

Hi, Joe:

I suspect that you are running into issues due to the way the Unix "shell" (or PASE shell or QShell) expands "patterns" in any command line.

The problem is, Unix shells do something called "globbing" -- they expand patterns into a list of "arguments" (e.g. file names), so that way, each Unix command does not have to know how to deal with patterns. The problem with this approach is, most Unix shells allow for only up to 255 arguments per command line.

So, you might want to try using the OS/400 or IBM i IFS commands like "MOV" directly from an OS/400 or IBM i command line -- some of these IFS commands accept a "pattern" and I suspect they process the pattern very differently than the way the Unix style "shell" does it.

Hope that helps,

Mark S. Waterbury

> On 4/17/2016 12:27 PM, Joe Pluta wrote:

On 4/16/2016 4:46 AM, Vernon Hamberg wrote:

I am pretty sure that WRKLNK has limits to how many it can display - around 32K, maybe. The message saying there are too many objects to display doesn't tell us what the limit is.

That's one place.

I think the ls QShell function can show more.

Now you've got me wondering - the ls command may indeed work. But then try to move the files. mv won't do it. You have to figure out how to mv one chunk at a time. Same with rm.

There's the ls function in PASE, as well, and that should have the limits of AIX, not IBM i.

As I noted above, ls might indeed work. The problem is then doing something: moving a large quantity of files (or removing or copying or doing anything with them). I know I tried PASE as well.

Then DSPF against an IFS directory is different from opt 5 in WRKLNK - I don't know what limits it has. We have a directory with over 70,000 files in it - DSPF against it seems not limited - it is a somewhat funky interface but worth a look, just for fun!

Now some functions in DSPF can stall out with that many objects - F16 can sort it but spins a long time, etc.

I sometimes go to Windows Explorer to work with all this stuff. Sorry to say, right?

Mapped drives with hundreds of thousands of file fail just as miserably.