On Jul 5, 2012, at 8:52 AM, Denis Excoffier wrote: > On Thu, Jul 05, 2012 at 08:19:51AM -0700, Tim Kientzle wrote: >>> >>> To be honest, I've considered altering bsdtar's directory-traversal >>> code so that it always sorts the first 100 names in a directory >>> and then leaves the rest unsorted. That would give fully-sorted >>> output for almost all cases and avoid the memory consumption >>> (and slow performance) on very large directories. >>> > Great! Do you mean something like > --sort-first-directory-entries=n (with default 100, and > possibly "unlimited"), default default being > --sort-first-directory-entries=0 if --sort-first-directory-entries > is not specified > > or > > --sort-directory / --no-sort-directory > with 100 not settable on the command line, and an array of > 100*(PATH_MAX+1) statically allocated in the code? > > I would prefer to avoid the second one of course because i'd like > to be able to easily raise 100 if needed (recompilation is okay).
Were I to implement such a feature at all, I would rather not provide any options at all. > In addition, "always" sorting is IMHO bad idea for people used > to get their 10000 files in directory order since ages. Who? Directory order is a very bad thing to rely on, especially with a proliferation of new file systems that use widely varying notions of "directory order." Tim
