When we hit a similar problem at work what I did was implement a module that took a base directory name and created two layers of 00..ff subdirectories (so 00/00, 00/01, ..., ff/fe, ff/ff). It then had a function that would take a "path" and return a real OS path for that file generated by running the filename through Digest::MD5 and splitting off the first pairs of hex digits. So given the base directory /tmp/hashed, the file fooble would get located in /tmp/hashed/03/63/03638a39d7858a61a982a1f21b33c215.

All of your calls to open should pass through the hashing function, or you can make a hashed_open that you call instead. If that still leaves too many files in any one subdirectory (although it should split them so there's only 1/64k files in any one directory) you can add another layer of subdirs.

In reply to Re: Automatically distributing and finding files in subdirectories by Fletch
in thread Automatically distributing and finding files in subdirectories by myuserid7

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