06 Jun 18 20:36, you wrote to me:

 ac>> *.MSG is another option, though access gets slower as your
 ac>> messagebase gets larger. Perhaps not noticably. Unlike the DOS
 ac>> days, lots of small files aren't such a problem on modern OSes.

 GK> I wouldn't bet on that one... it merely depends on what "lots of"
 GK> actually mean. Having a several k of files in one flat directory might
 GK> very well get you into trouble on modern OS and FS as well.

I would bet money on it.

Have you looked at the Maildir format used for email storage? It's
supported by a whole bunch of software and works exactly the same way. One
file per message. I use it here. It works well. Performance isn't
necessarily stellar but can be improved by the software using intelligent
caching. Modern OSes also perform filesystem caching which can help, too.

 GK> Might simply start with not easily being able to delete them anymore
 GK> on the commandline under *ix systems.

What? No. :-)

It's possible to delete ANY file (assuming filesystem permissions allow it)
from the command-line on any Linux/BSD/OSX operating system released in the
past 20 years, and I would bet money on it.

If you're referring to filename globbing done by the shell, then yes, this
can be a problem if you reach the kernel's limit for the length of the
command or number of arguments.

But the solution is just to not use command-line globbing. The usual way is
with find:

find . -iname '*.msg' -delete

where find itself does the globbing (wildcard pattern matching).

In this case I'm using -iname to perform a case-insensitive search, since
the files might be named 1.MSG, 2.MSG instead of 1.msg, 2.msg, etc.

-+- GoldED+/BSD 1.1.5-b20170303
* Origin: Blizzard of Ozz, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia (3:633/267)
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