Many, many files to handle?

[jjordan]

You'll tell I'm fairly new by the question, but here goes.

I have removable 40GB to 120GB drives. On one drive, I have over 8,000 mp3 files. When I use Nautilius (RedHat7.3), it says that it can't handle that many files and won't show me all of them. This stunned me! Why?

Is there a configuration file that I can change something in so I can see all of them?

Or some other means, besides a terminal view of them?

I'm really surprised that windoz has no problems with that many files and something in Linux does.

Does Nautilius suck or what?

Oh, yeah, the copy/paste commands don't work either. Says there's nothing in the clipboard to paste when I try to copy/paste files.

If there IS a better windows manager? (is that what it's called), then please either tell me what I will need to do to switch over to it, or tell me where to find that information.

Thanks for any advice you may offer.

[wapcaplet]

Don't know about other file managers, but when I want to view that many files at once, I usually use a terminal window. 'ls' has no problem with huge numbers of files.

Also, if it gets too long for a terminal buffer to hold all of it, you can redirect the output of ls to a text file:

ls > dirlist.txt
vi dirlist.txt (or whatever editor you like)

[DrFrankenstein]

or pipe it to less

ls|less

[Fryguy8]

wow you don't have your mp3s organized into directories? and the problem with nautilus is probably memory (not a bad thing, it just doesn't want to use all of your memory to display 1 folder)

[jjordan]

I'm sorry, I guess I should have explained WHY I do what I do.

Coming from windoz, I had Winamp on the screen and filemanager opened to one of my removable hard disks with mp3 files on them (I like to see all my music alphabetically). I would like to drag and drop which songs I would like in my playlist to listen to.

Is it too much to expect to be able to do this in Linux, with some filemanager, when it seemed like a simple thing for windoz to handle?

p.s. I'm open for a better way to handle this.

[Read Icculus]

Nautilus is no good for browsing thousands of files in a single directory. Try mc in a terminal. It has no problem with thousands of files and it's a nice terminal shell. Or if you want something a bit more graphical try X WinCommander. It works fine with 1000's of files in a folder, and is a decent windows file explorer clone.

[williamwbishop]

Or konqueror, change the settings to not display icons, that way no memory is wasted. Open and view the directory, I use it to browse my box, and it seems to have no problems displaying 3000 files in a single directory.

[Elijah]

command line will do, but try rox, it's small enough to handle any number of files.

[wapcaplet]

I've been trying out a couple of file managers since I switched from Gnome to Fluxbox. Rox is pretty decent, and fast, though kind of flaky (at least for me it was, YMMV). I'd go for Midnight Commander, but I just like my GUI too much.

I just found another one called Endeavour Mark II (http://wolfpack.twu.net/Endeavour2/) which looks to be very good. Don't know how well it will handle huge numbers of files - though it was just now able to display the contents of my /dev directory (~700 files) in about half a second. Also doubles as an archive manager, image browser, etc. Check it out!

[jjordan]

wapcaplet, after looking at Rox, Gentoo and a few others, which I downloaded and looked at all the websites and comments on other forums, I downloaded Endeavour2. complied and installed it.

Ran it and came right up. Clicked on a removable drive that I has over 11,000 mp3 files on it.

Better sit down for this one. It displayed all 11,334 files in under 2/10 th of a second! Not cached!

I couldn't believe it, so I tried it again. This time, it was almost instantaneous. WOW!

Havne't played with it to see how stable it is, but it sure can handle my large directories.

Thanks for the advice.

[wapcaplet]

Originally posted by jjordan
I downloaded Endeavour2. complied and installed it.

Ran it and came right up. Clicked on a removable drive that I has over 11,000 mp3 files on it.

Better sit down for this one. It displayed all 11,334 files in under 2/10 th of a second! Not cached!

Yeah, I've been using it a lot since I found it. I haven't tried it on directories that big, but I'm amazed by its speed! Don't know how it does it.

Now, if only OpenOffice ran like this... :D

[Hena]

Originally posted by wapcaplet
Don't know about other file managers, but when I want to view that many files at once, I usually use a terminal window. 'ls' has no problem with huge numbers of files.
Sidetracking here, but gotta say. I found out that atleast rm cannot handle over 32k files ("rm -f dir/*" with dir/ having over 32k files). I haven't checked carefully that amount, but when i get file amount like 32k+ it has failed. I think its the integer number limit stopping it or something. Might also be bash that is causing. Dunno, but there are limits :). In my example "rm -rf dir" works though so, that is handled someway differently...