Hi everyone,

I have a directory on an NTFS file system (XP SP2) which contains an absurd number of files (about 90,000). We would like to subdivide these files into directories based on filename. Unfortunately, Windows doesn't seem to be able to handle this many files in a directory. The directory is pretty much un-browseable.

I tried doing this via cgywin, but the mv command segfaults.

I can't seem to figure out how to mount this filesystem rw in knoppix, so apparently rw NTFS isn't there yet. Is this true?

Anyone have any sneaky ideas on how to do this?

Thanks in advance,

Jim

[rant]I am once again dumbfounded that people use this operating system for anything other than playing games. Some large companies actually use it for critical systems. I would fire anyone who made that decision.[/rant]

We used to have this problem way back with windows 95, we were able to move files using the dos box then.

edit:
Mounting ntfs rw with knoppix should be possible:
http://homes.esat.kuleuven.be/~decockd/site/myHowTos/applications/ntfsReadWrite/

Well... i have an idea about how you could do this..

You could copy the files to a new folder (or set of folders) from a command prompt using XCOPY e.g.

XCOPY C:\source\a*.* C:\A_Files

would copy all the files from the source folder which begin with "a" to the folder "A_Files"

You would need to repeat this to get all the files, and it could take a while with that many files, but it should work!

Hope this helps

Rich

Why don't you just use the move command??

If cygwin's mv dies with this many files, I would go the brute force way: list the names into a file and edit it (sed's or vi's regular expressions come handy) and source the script (as opposed to executing it, thus saving 90000 executions of the shell).

I think there must be something a little wrong that machine. I just created 65536 files named "1" to "65536" in a folder to test this out.

I managed to move all the files beginning with "1" to a folder using the move command in about 40 seconds. I then moved 5000 files to another folder using Explorer in about 20 seconds.

Admittedly Explorer takes a while to respond when you first navigate to the folder, but I have seen Linux some GUI file managers behave just as slowly when faced with similar numbers of files.

P.S. in Windows 2000 the Explorer 5000 file move would have taken forever, thankfully they optmised something in Explorer in XP when moving large numbers of files.

I used FileSort to move a large group of files around based on the filename.

Windows is slow/unresponsive accessing the folder because every file extension has to be checked to determine the icon. If you have an active virus scanner running it can slow this down a lot. I'm not sure how your trying to move the files but if you select a group of files in the folder and then right click on the selected group windows again has to check every file extension to determine what options you will get. The more programs that you've installed that add shell extensions the more this will slow this down.

I use ZTree (A newly written knockoff of the old XTree file manager program). You tag files first to do any sort of operation on them (or use Cntl-T to mass tag) and then use commands like M or CnTL-M to mass-move files. Works like a charm, also very powerful for renaming files. I use it all the time for much of my file manager needs....

It doesn't suffer from that initial lag when starting up in a large directory because you have to log the files first that you want to operate on (Alt-Log-Branch). So it selectively lets you log files to work with.

I've been using XTree and now ZTree for 15 years, great stuff....

Thanks, Randy

Well, technically you don't want exactly what your title implies, but I've been itching to plug a great program I found that does what your subject line asks for:

The Rename!!

It's the best tool I've found for batch renaming files. It seems very powerful, too. It's possible that it might be able to sort into new folders as well, which is part of what you're asking to do.

Oh man.... I remember Xtree (gold)

I used it for EVERYTHING. At the time, it was the only way to delete an entire tree structure. Very powerful and very fast. I need to try Ztree now.

It sounds like you´ve had several problems with your machine lately. I think what you need is this . It´s the one tool that never lets me down when my computer really starts acting up and refuses to do what I want.