[bronto]

I have recently discovered after a fsck, that "Nesting of folders has exceeded the recommended limit of 100 (667724, 1821)". I have been unable to fix this problem and a search of these forums revealed a previous poster with a similar problem.

Someone offered the suggestion of running this command in the terminal;

find / -type d | awk '{print gsub(/\//,"/",$1), " ___"$1;}'

but I am not very unix savvy, and do not know how to interpret the results I am getting. The other thing I have noticed is that Process Viewer shows, "nsfiod" running four times but it is not using any cpu or ram.

Could anyone help me with this?

[Rainy Day]

I have recently discovered after a fsck, that "Nesting of folders has exceeded the recommended limit of 100 (667724, 1821)".

I have never encountered this message, but it appears only to be a warning only, and not an execution error. Still, it does beg the question: Why so many levels of nesting?

find / -type d | awk '{print gsub(/\//,"/",$1), " ___"$1;}'

but I am not very unix savvy, and do not know how to interpret the results I am getting.

The first number is the nesting level of folders; the path is displayed after the " ___"

There is going to be a lot of output from this script. The output should be filtered like this:

Code:
find / -type d | awk '{print gsub(/\//,"/",$1), " ___"$1;}'| grep -Ev "^[[:digit:]]{1,2} "

That will filter out lines beginning with a number less than a 100.

The other thing I have noticed is that Process Viewer shows, "nsfiod" running four times but it is not using any cpu or ram.

This is normal. Do not worry about it.

[bronto]

Thanks for your help Rainy Day. You are right , fsck is reporting the warning but it is not listed as an error. I have run the command you suggested but the terminal reported permission denied on quite a few files. I repaired permissions but no change occured so I tried it as root and the only reply was;

/: /dev/fd/4: No such file or directory

Any suggestions on what to do? Thanks again.

[Rainy Day]

Don't worry about the errors from that find command. Some of those "files" aren't real files, but devices, etc., and that's causing many of those "errors." Just look at the lines which aren't errors. All that command is really good for is to point you to where these nested folders are. It is not, in and of itself, a disk diagnostic.

It is curious that you should have so many levels of nesting, and perhaps that is something you should look into, but on the other hand, it shouldn't keep you awake at night either.

But if it does worry you, then you should probably pick up a copy of DiskWarrior and rebuild the directory. It is about the best Macintosh disk utility available and, in my opinion, every Macintosh user should have it. It'll keep your HD healthy, and good for the odd emergency when your HD crashes.

[bronto]

I have a copy of DiscWarrior(2.1.1), but it doesn't find a problem. Perhaps when DW3 comes out it might pick it up. Until then I will take your advice and not worry about it, as it doesn't seem to cause any problems at the moment, and if a problem does emerge hopefully it will provide a trail or clue.

Thanks very much for your assistance.

Bronto

[Rainy Day]

I have a copy of DiscWarrior(2.1.1), but it doesn't find a problem.

If DiskWarrior says it's not a problem, i'd have to say maybe we shouldn't call it a "problem." But it is a lot of nesting levels, and perhaps there might be other reasons why you don't want to have that on your HD (e.g. performance issues?). I'm assuming it was probably created by some kind of recursive algorithm (maybe in a cache?), and didn't occur "naturally" (i.e. it's not your doing). If it were on my Mac, i wouldn't lose sleep over it, but i'd probably be curious about why i had it.

[mmurray]

Have you tried a search for the software
Vapor ?

If you install this it will cause this kind of problem.

If you don't have Vapor I think you can find the file by doing

sudo find / -inum 667724


At least that worked for me with obviously the number my fsck produced replacing yours. It may take awhile (10 minutes ??) to run but it should just return the name of the file.

Michael

[bronto]

I have never used Vapor, but that search you suggested found the "problem". One of the Safari "add-ons" had resulted in a long string of folders within folders. It probably occurred when saving a folder of the same name as the existing one. I will let the developer know about this, in case it is a bug, rather than something that was caused by myself or other factors.

Thanks for your help on this, although it didn't seem to be detrimental at all, as Rainy Day inferred, it is nice to know why.

Bronto