How to best do zillions of little files?

[jc at trillian.mit.edu (John Chambers)]

David Kramer wrote:
| On Wednesday 02 October 2002 11:02 am, Nathan Meyers wrote:
| > On Wed, Oct 02, 2002 at 10:53:58AM -0400, Scott Prive wrote:
| > > I haven't done a bit of work in this area, but I have read how the
| > > embedded and floppy Linux systems work: they conserve space (other
| > > filesystem reasons also?) by creating a monolithic file that handles
| > > everything, and just create links from the "files" to the file that h=
| as
| > > everything.
| >
| > Sounds like a DBMS :-).
|
| Seconded!

Well, yeah, but it also describes the usual unix  file  system.   The
single  file  is  called  something like "/dev/hda3", and within that
file, a file system is implemented.  That file system has names  that
are  a  string  of keywords, which looks a whole lot like a DBMS key.
Lots of people have observed  that  you  can  easily  implement  many
common  DB  "features" simply by playing games with the way you build
pathnames and create directories.  Thus, the shell globbing that does
things like '*' and '?' implement cross-sections or projections.  And
so on.

This is not an accident ...