@lord @drwho It sounds like you're describing implementing a trie in the file system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie
I think I'd end up with…billions…of empty folders though
@codesections @drwho Hoo i didn't know this word.
Thanks.
This is employed in some rainbow tables to do fast lookup.
@drwho @codesections Yes, when you need to grep big files containing hashes it's an easy way to split files into smaller chunks to parse them really fast.
Each time you can't process you file fast enough, you split them a bit more.
It needs a little bit more storage but it speeds up the processing.