Yes I'm talking Linux not BSD so with any luck you won't have the same 'ls' issue; it is not a crash but painfully slow. The only other issue I recall is wildcards fail if they encompass too many files (presumably a bash/max command line size).
I would expect the various GUI file managers may give unpredictable results; I would also not rely on remotely mounting the bigdir cross-platform. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
