No space left on device
Martin v. Loewis
martin at v.loewis.de
Wed Feb 20 17:44:02 EST 2002
sag at hydrosphere.com (Sue Giller) writes:
> I have a program that generates a LOT of small files in a
> Windows2000 subdirectory. It is my understanding (often faulty)
> that there is no limit to the number of files such a subdirectory can
> contain. However, I am getting an error when I hit about 21,843
> files.
What file system? I believe there *is* a limit to the number of files
you can have in a directory on a FAT32 file system. There is also
actually a limit to the number of files you can have in a directory
residing on an NTFS volume, but that is much larger.
IOW, there is no file system in wide use that is without limits.
> I have over 5 G of space on the drive, and the test files are 0 len
> anyway. (It still happens if the files are not 0 len)
I think it maxed out the directory size, then.
> I can then create additional files in that directory from within a DOS
> window, but I cannot rerun my file generator to make even one more
> file. So I am wondering if the limit comes from Windows, from
> Python 'open...' or some other innards of Python.
It should be a Windows limit; Python is passing the request straigth
to Windows. My guess is that there is a maximum directory size,
counting the number of bytes that the directory consumes on disk; I
would not be surprised if this is 2GB on a FAT32 system (or perhaps
4GB). You may need to turn off 8.3 file name generation (ask MSDN for
details), to reduce the space consumed by a single directory entry.
You may also try to use shorter file names.
Regards,
Martin
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