Re: [Bug-tar] [PATCH] tar: more reliable directory traversal when creating archives

[Jim Meyering]

Paul Eggert wrote:
> On 09/07/2010 02:37 AM, Jim Meyering wrote:
>> on NetBSD 5.0.2 it's just 128.  While most
>> distribution tarballs fit easily within such a limitation, when you
>> use tar to perform backups, you might find such a low number to be a
>> serious limitation.  Even 1024 seems far too low for a tool like tar.
>
> Yeowch.  What are those NetBSD guys _thinking_ (:-)?  Anyway, I will try to
> fix 'tar' so that it doesn't need a file descriptor for each level of
> the directory hierarchy.

For the record, here are some more numbers (output of "getconf OPEN_MAX"):
  openBSD 4.7     128
  sunos 5.11      256
  darwin 9.8.0    256
  freeBSD 8.0   11095
  linux 2.6.36   1024