scalable-ls

Rust implementation of this blog or discussion

Introduction

scalable-ls is a Rust-based command-line tool designed to list the contents of directories containing an extremely large number of files. Traditional tools like ls can struggle or fail in these environments, but scalable-ls is optimized to handle such scenarios efficiently.

Installation

Ensure you have Rust and Cargo installed on your system. Clone this repository and navigate to the project directory. Build the project using Cargo:

cargo build --release

Usage

Create empty files

To create a directory and populate it with empty files under demo-files directory, use the following command:

./create_files.sh

To list the files in a directory, use the following command:

cargo run -- [OPTIONS] <PATH>

Options:

• -b, --buf_size <BUF_SIZE>: Set the buffer size for reading directory entries (default is 5MB).

Example:

cargo run -- ./demo_files/

cargo run -- --buf-size 1000000 ./demo_files/

Features

• Handles directories with millions of files.
• Efficient directory listing without hanging or crashing.
• Customizable buffer size for performance tuning.

Example

For 20000 files, both seem to be working. But, it could fail for larger number of files & also output is inconsistent in native ls in case of large numbers of files: