On Jul 4, 2012, at 11:57 PM, Denis Excoffier wrote: > > I understand that in the most general case, the memory requirements > might be huge (or use temporary files like 'sort', or use 'sort' > itself). But it has to be taken into account that someone who stores, > say, 10000 files/subdirs in a single directory has probably the > necessary amount of memory to perform 'ls' (with default arguments) on > this directory, which also sorts the output.
Such people generally use "ls -f" a lot. > For tar, --no-sort-directories would definitely be the default. To be honest, I've considered altering bsdtar's directory-traversal code so that it always sorts the first 100 names in a directory and then leaves the rest unsorted. That would give fully-sorted output for almost all cases and avoid the memory consumption (and slow performance) on very large directories. Tim
