Huge directories in XENIX

[RICHARD RONTELTAP]

" Huge directory < /bbs/files/ibm >--call administrator "

The is the friendly message that greets me, I use du, find, or tar on
the directory mentioned above.
The directory is indeed pretty big, once there were over 2K files in it,
which means the directory file is now over 32K bytes.

No problem, I thought, just ignore it. Performance is slow on large
directories, but this is just a download directory, not accessed too
frequently.

Wrong! tar doesn't work anymore. It repetetively backs up the same files of
the 'huge' directory.

--- WHY??

Is it written somewhere: Thou shalt not have a direcory with over 2K entries?
Do tar (and others) try to read the directory in 1 go, with a buffer of
32K allocated. (That seems pretty 'naive', to put it mildly)

Since tar, du and find all give exaclty the same message, I assume the
culprit piece of code is in a standard library call. FTW(S) is a good
candidate. The manual, however, says nothing about a maximum directory
length, only subdirectory depth is mentioned.

Any advice is welcome.

Oh yeah, the software is: XENIX /386 2.2.3

Richard
(...!mcvax!neabbs!richard)