Given that this just creates empty files named "file-#.txt", you can "just" create a Fuse file system that simply exposes a billion files named that way for bas

Given that this just creates empty files named "file-#.txt", you can "just" create a Fuse file system that simply exposes a billion files named that way for basically no space on disk and no time spent creating it. In fact given that the author said this took over a day to run I could probably write this code faster than the author was able to run the script once on a concrete file system. This isn't really a problem about optimizing the storage of a billion empty files, it's about what the file systems do with them.