how to navigate directories with heaps of files

Question

My Linux file system has tens of thousands of files per directory. Viewing a list of all the files takes a few minutes for my system to calculate, which is too slow. But I am not sure what files are in each directory so want to view a list of the first few, like what the head command does for large files. Is there a command that efficiently does this?

Edit: Piping ls to something else is no good because ls takes a few minutes to complete, before piping the output. I need a command that will only return the first few records.

Answer 1

Try ls -f which does not sort.

Answer 2

For each of the directories you can do the following by a shell script

Try this, this gives one page full of entries

ls | more

You can even push this to some file if you want so that you can refer to it later, for that use this

ls | more > filenames.txt

Thanks

Answer 3

If you want to list N first entries, I would just create a small C program that does an opendir call and then N calls to readdir

Answer 4

It depends on the filesystem, but it's usually quicker to list filenames only (look at the directory object) versus all the file metadata (saves one stat() per file).

Have you tried ls -R?

Otherwise, it might pay you to run the GNU locate program in the background periodically, and use the generated DB to track it.

Answer 5

You can use head:

ls -l | head