Greg Troxel <gdt_at_ir.bbn.com> writes:
[...]
> [ducking!]  (even though total RVM etc. is bounded, 4000 files in a
> directory doesn't seem all that wierd...).

<bashing>
In the days before computer science people entered 
the scene Bioinformatic data was stored (and still is :-(
as flat files. 
</bashing>

Protein Data Bank (rcsb.org) has some 13.000 files, 
organized similar to debian ftp package-pools,
with 13.000 symbolic links in one directory pointing 
to the actual files ... 

No, I don't expect coda to handle that ;-)

So long,
Steffen