Can Linux OS can be crashed of large number of files? Let's say a box with
50 millions files in the directory.

"Can Linux OS can be crashed of large number of files?"

I don't think so. I think that you run out of disk space for file inodes before the file system logic fails because of too many file names.

I have run into a problem with the cp command. The cp command can only handle a certain number of file names in a directory and the man pages for Qt exceed this number.

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Steve Stites

On a related note, this reminded me of the "AV DoS", as it was recently on Bugtraq (again). AV scanners can scan compressed archives, but some scanners do not use proper mechanism to detect multiple compressed archives inside compressed archives, which in effect creates a bomb, cuz they need to unpack the archives before scanning. While this could keep only the scanner busy indefinately and not crash Linux, it would also fill up the $TMP partition: if using /tmp, then other Linux apps looses the capability to use /tmp. If using /var/tmp, (or symlinked /tmp to /var/tmp) then other Linux apps looses the capability to use /tmp, and eventually loose ANY system logging. If /var and/or /tmp are linked to the VFS root, then any writes could eventually be denied (kinda fun on reboot). Goes to show "large number of files" doesn't necessarily need to be fifty million to cause problems.