Greetings.

When I press tab in bash without having typed anything at all (which is somewhat 
abusive but it easily happens), bash works for 15 minutes, going through $PATH looking 
for executables (and in the end producing nothing) on a 2x450 MHz PIII. Is that normal?

My $PATH contains the usual /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin, the WINNT and System32 
directories, plus some relatively neglectable ones (18 directories in total), but the 
number of directories in the path and the time it takes to go through their contents 
is not the problem. Matching an executable in the last directory in $PATH only takes 
about 0.2 s. Instead, the huge size of the resulting list seems to be what causes the 
delay, especially when considering that no disk I/O at all is performed during 14 min 
59 sec of the 15 minutes...

I suspect that someone has chosen a sorting algorithm with time complexity O(N^2). Or 
O(2^N)...

Maybe I can find that out myself.

Cheers,
Magnus


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