Directories That Grow

[Jeff Beadles]

pjh at mccc.uucp (Pete Holsberg) writes:
>In my news directory structure, certain very active directories appear
>to be growing without bound.  For example, $NEWS/in.coming is very large
>but at this point contain about 4 actual files.
>
>How can I "reset" these directories so that "leading" entries with inode
>0 are removed?
>
>Thanks,
>Pete


Easy!  Just do this.

(Make sure that you are not receiving/processing news when you do this.)

cd $NEWS
mv in.coming in.coming.old
mkdir in.coming
chmod xxx in.coming		# Change to whatever permissions/owner the old
chown xxx in.coming		# directory had.
chgrp xxx in.coming

mv in.coming.old/* in.coming

That will work as long as there are no files that start with "." in the
directory.  If there are some (other than . and ..) you need to move them too.

In Unix, directories grow, but never shrink.  This is the only way that I know
of to do this.

Best,
	-Jeff
-- 
Jeff Beadles				jeff at quark.WV.TEK.COM 
Utek Engineering, Tektronix Inc.	+1 503 685 2568
			"Credo quia absurdum"