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Filezilla listing only 9998 files

Hello Friends,

I feel happy to meet you again in my second post of 2016. Recently I came across an issue where the Filezilla listing only 9998 files in the directory listing whereas the folder had more that 20000+ files in it.

The Filezilla forums said that there are no limits at the FTP client’s (Filezilla) end on number of files to be displayed during the directory listing

However, some FTP server configurations may have this setup to truncate the output list of files  to 10000 files so that you can view only 9998 file listed in the directory listing.

What is that setting and How to change it? 
The option name changes with the type of FTP server we use. Most commonly used FTP servers in Linux are Pure-FTPD and Pro-FTPD. Let us see the setup for PureFTPD
~~~~
1) Open /etc/pure-ftpd.conf
2) Search for the Variable : LimitRecursion
3) You will find the below given line :
—–
LimitRecursion 10000 8
—–
Which means the file list output has been limited to 10000 files.
4) You can change this value to increase or decrease the Output limit.
Remember to restart the FTP service after changing the value.
5) You can find this limit being indicated in your FTP client itself through the following response lines:
—–
Command: MLSD
Response: 150 Accepted data connection
Response: 226-Options: -a -l
Response: 226 Output truncated to 10000 matches
Status: Directory listing successful
——
~~~~~

The same operation is handled by ListOptions Directive in Pro-FTPD FTP server. You can read more about it in the URL below:
—–
http://www.proftpd.org/docs/directives/linked/config_ref_ListOptions.html
—–

I hope you find this useful. I always welcome both positive and negative comments and suggestion to improve my posts.

Have a Great Day Friends !!! 😉 🙂 🙂

3 thoughts on “Filezilla listing only 9998 files”

    1. Hello Ridha,

      First of all please accept my apologies for not replying on time. I would gladly help you. The steps are as follows:
      ********************************************************************************************
      1) Log into your shell account as the root user.
      ~~~~~
      ssh root@serverIP -p SSH_port_number
      ~~~~~

      2) Move to the /etc folder.
      ~~~~~
      cd /etc/
      ~~~~~

      3) Open the pure-ftpd.conf file for editing. For this example, we use the nano command.
      ~~~~~
      vi pure-ftpd.conf
      ~~~~~

      4) Scroll through the document and locate the LimitRecursion setting. Below is a sample of this line.
      ~~~~~
      # ‘ls’ recursion limits. The first argument is the maximum number of
      # files to be displayed. The second one is the max subdirectories depth

      LimitRecursion 10000 8
      ~~~~~

      5) The first number of the setting is the limit of files that cPanel and FTP will display while the second is the max depth of the subdirectories. Increase the first number to allow more files to be displayed. Below we increase the number from 10000 to 50000.
      ~~~~~
      # ‘ls’ recursion limits. The first argument is the maximum number of
      # files to be displayed. The second one is the max subdirectories depth

      LimitRecursion 50000 8
      ~~~~~

      6) Save your file according to the editor used. Using “vi” editor, we first press Esc key, then press “:wq!”, then press Enter Key. This will save the file under the same name.

      7) Once the file is saved, you will need to restart the ftp service for the new configuration to take effect. The command for that is below as well as a before and after shot of the number of files displayed in an FTP client. Notice the number of files at the bottom of the images.
      ~~~~~~
      service pure-ftpd restart
      ~~~~~~
      8) All done !!!.
      ********************************************************************************************

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