Unlimited Subdirectories (HTree Indexing)
Introduction File systems are the silent workhorses that make modern computing possible. While most users interact with them through simple operations—open a file, save a document, delete a folder—the underlying data structures are far more complex. One such complexity is the handling of directory entries, especially when a directory contains millions of files or tens of thousands of subdirectories. Historically, many file systems imposed hard limits on the number of subdirectories a single directory could contain. The reason? Traditional linear directory layouts required scanning the entire list of entries for every lookup, making large directories both slow and memory‑intensive. ...