[plug] deleting files

[Brad Campbell]

Steve Boak wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Apr 2004 06:50 pm, Brad Campbell wrote:
> 
>>raven at themaw.net wrote:
> 
> <>
> 
>>I have a directory that contains ~7500 links and I regenerate it quite
>>regularly. Thats how I do it also. Far easier.
> 
> 
> OK - I'm mystified. Why would you need 7500 links? (I know after you tell me I 
> will realise I should have known...)

I have a music jukebox system that dates back to windows 3.1 and dos, and as a legacy (and for 
speed) all the metadata is stored in a flat file database. To fit with the 8.3 filename system at 
the time, all files started life as aaaa0001.mp3 and so on. They are also broken up into directories 
of about 160 files each (650mb) for ease of backup. The jukebox software knows how to find them, but 
as technology progressed and storage got cheaper and all that, I decided that it would be nice to 
present them on the network as artist name - file name.mp3 format. So I have a bit of code that goes 
through and creates a single directory with a properly named symbolic link through to the original 
file. Yes it seems convoluted and yes I know about id3 tags and all the rest, but this system was 
written for raw performance on the minimum hardware (It runs comfortably on a pentium 100 notebook) 
whereas scanning 7500 mp3s for id3 tags and inserting them into some form of database, ease of 
database updates and fitting the whole thing in about 2 megs is not practical doing it many other 
ways, most of which were not even a gleam in the authors eye when I wrote the first code on this 
one. (At the time the only mp3 encoder was the dos based frauhoffer one, and there was only the 
original win3.1 16bit mp3 player, winamp had not even been thought of). The original code was 
written in Delphi Version 1 and ran on windows only (I had not discovered Linux back then)

I don't particularly expect you to have known that, but there is the history behind the massive 
tangle that is my music system :p)

Regards,
Brad