Is there a way to compact a very large directory under EXT2/EXT3 without simply remaking the directory?
I recall that perlfunc cautions that the OS implementations of seekdir
and telldir
run the risk of directory compaction. which sounds like what I want in this case, but I'm unfamiliar with those semantics in practice.
background: I've a few directories that are themselves many MB in size -- they were overrun with a zillion small files in the past:
$ ls -lh
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 1.3M Oct 5 12:49 big
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 2.3M Oct 5 12:49 this_one_is_empty_now
drwxr-x--- 2 root root 6.1M Oct 5 12:49 yikes