how many files are allowed in a folder?

Bill Blanton wrote in
ng.com:

On 10/25/2011 12:06, Lostgallifreyan wrote:
Bill wrote in
ng.com:

Not just short of, but exactly 65536. The .dot and ..dot dot
entries take up two, so 65534 "visible" file directory entries. That's
the number of dir entries allowed. That means 65534 shortname files.
Longname files will use more.


That's what I was getting at. I knew that two entries were used up
but I wasn't sure if the . and .. entries per directory also counted so
I assumed they might. While the two at root are invisible,[...]

Actually the root does not contain the dot and dotdot entries. The
pointers to the root are in the volume boot sector. There may be a
volume name which would take one entry.


I realised that when I corrected my misconception (that the allocation was
per partition..) Before that, looking a drive root in DOS I thought they were
just hidden, but obviously a .. could have no meaning at root anyway. A .
will work in a root for CD \ for example, but that might just be coded for to
be convenient and consistent, so far as I know.

On Oct 25, 5:12*pm, Bill Blanton wrote:
On 10/25/2011 11:19, Robert Macy wrote:





On Oct 25, 5:56 am, Tim *wrote:
Robert *wrote:
up to almost 2,000 files in a single sub folder in a subfolder in C:
drive

want to avoid catastrophic scrambling of data and information loss

How many files can reside in a single folder?

It depends on the file system.

In the FAT systems a directory can contain up to 65,536 entries. A
single file can use up to 13 entries, depending on the length of its
name. In FAT16 the root directory was further restricted, but that
limit was removed in FAT32.

In NTFS, there's no limit. You can have up to 4,294,967,295 files in a
partition, but there's no limit on how many of those may be in a
single directory.

PS: might be important: the filenames are all contiguous characters
with NO spaces
almost all files are *.txt and actual count is 1,599 files in 15.8MB

Total space occupied by the files makes no difference. A directory is
a special type of file containing information about other files. It
tells where to find those files, but does not contain their contents.

--
Tim Slattery
/slatteryt

arrrggg! *reply to answer all

Thank you ALL for the replies.

My conclusions:
I can do a directory filename check and check for lengths of names. I
can then divide that into the total available and 'estimate' maximum
number.
But, most importantly, *if* I do exceed the limit, nothing weird
happens, I'm merely denied access.

That depends on what you use the directory for. If static data, you'll
probably not have any weird problems. You will see a very noticeable hit
in performance when accessing the directory when you approach the
limit.. probably even when approaching half the limit.

I've a script to create "x" number of files, and have used it to create
65534 shortname files in a dir, and it takes explorer probably 20
seconds or more to read the whole dir. That on a relatively fast machine.

Thank you for testing. Makes sense.

Right now I can see the 'hesitation' with only 1601 files

"Robert Macy" wrote:

But, most importantly, *if* I do exceed the limit, nothing weird
happens, I'm merely denied access.

Right now I can see the 'hesitation' with only 1601 files

Any chance all your files / folders are somewhere inside My Documents?

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...43&postcount=4

Sanity Clause wrote:
"Robert Macy" wrote:

But, most importantly, *if* I do exceed the limit, nothing weird
happens, I'm merely denied access.

Right now I can see the 'hesitation' with only 1601 files

Any chance all your files / folders are somewhere inside My Documents?

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...43&postcount=4

I never ran into any problems with that supposed issue (and that's with
thousands of files and hundreds of subdirectories). But I also had all
indexing and Find Fast (and such) completely disabled. I still think it's
kind of an old wives tale. :-)

"Bill in Co" wrote in
m:

Sanity Clause wrote:
"Robert Macy" wrote:

But, most importantly, *if* I do exceed the limit, nothing weird
happens, I'm merely denied access.

Right now I can see the 'hesitation' with only 1601 files

Any chance all your files / folders are somewhere inside My Documents?

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...43&postcount=4

I never ran into any problems with that supposed issue (and that's with
thousands of files and hundreds of subdirectories). But I also had all
indexing and Find Fast (and such) completely disabled. I still think
it's kind of an old wives tale. :-)




Well, the poster on that web page had a point, but some wrong assumptions.
Those 'special folders' are just that. Special. And Directories. (Any chance
I can ditch the term 'folder', I take it).

Microsoft claiming that FAT32 is the reason for a slow access is
disingenuous. It doesn't matter if NTFS might be faster (not at all sure it
is actually) if something else is slowing things down a lot more! It really
doesn't matter in principle if what makes a directory or filetype 'special'
is a hidden DESKTOP.INI file, a registry 'stream' or ClassId associating with
some function in some DLL, or an Explorer shell extension added to the system
(such as MP3ext which I use because it won't affect anything with no MP3's
in it, and is mighty useful when there are any). ANYTHING that involves more
than fetching some list of files for display is going to be slower than
fetching some list of files to display.

I avoid this 'special' thing by using my own paths, and direct pointers to
them. I did this when I was new and paranoid and thought a computer was an
excellent replacement for my typewriter. I never regretted it because this
way stuff stays where I put it, how I put it, etc. There is an actual
'special folders' bit in the registry. Some of them can be made to behave
normally just by removing their registry entries. Others, like Program Files,
are better left intact, because their associated code linkage is solely to
speed access to executables by knowing where they are without depending on
the system path (which doesn't include that branch anyway). Same applies to
the program shortcuts branch.

Some virtual directory lists are great though. I like the W98 'find' because
it can go up to 10,000 files (limited I guess to avoid chugging too heavily,
but it might be hackable to make it do more if there was a need). As it is,
it can locate and show stuff from different locations as if it's in the SAME
location. For exploring and organising stuff, this is more useful than ANY
'special' method I ever saw, it's the equivalent of 'symbolic links' (as
opposed to shortcuts), a method of direct remote file access normally found
in NT kernel OS's or UNIX OS's, and better yet, you can change the search
terms to quickly reselect different files in one virtual directory. And
unlike all the 'specials', it's fast (after first system-wide scan per
session). A bit quirky especially during bulk deletions after which a re-
find is best applied to refresh it, but it's good, suggesting that M$ got a
great idea then started making it less great as years went by, probably by
putting too many useless tasks loaded onto the processor when a simple list
and icon display is usually more than enough.

On Oct 26, 11:48*pm, "Sanity Clause" wrote:
"Robert Macy" wrote:
But, most importantly, *if* I do exceed the limit, nothing weird
happens, I'm merely denied access.
Right now I can see the 'hesitation' with only 1601 files

Any chance all your files / folders are somewhere inside My Documents?

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...43&postcount=4

NEVER !!!