Re: mkdir error message -- what does this mean?

On Fri, Sep 30, 2022 at 3:03 PM Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, 30 Sep 2022 14:48:09 -0400
> Paul Procacci <pprocacci@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >      31 EMLINK Too many links. Maximum allowable hard links to a single
> > file has been exceeded (limit of 32767 hard links per file).
> >
> > I betcha the parent directory has at least this many number of objects in
> > it.
>
>         DIRHASH has a lot to answer for, time was we'd jump through hoops
> when writing applications to avoid having huge numbers of files in a
> directory, now nobody notices any problems until they hit the limit.

To make matters worse many modern apps have a legal requirement to
retain files.  The offending app is a medical records system that has
a minimal retention requirements for most of the files of 18 months
and some files as long as 7 years (the offending files where in the
second category since they are the "physical" proscription from a
doctor [the system has several hundred doctors spread over 50 or so
orgs).  Note it took 8 years of moderate to heavy use to hit this
limit and it was only because we never wrote any code to delete
emptied out dirs.
>
> --
> Steve O'Hara-Smith <steve@sohara.org>
>


-- 
Aryeh M. Friedman, Lead Developer, http://www.PetiteCloud.org