On Wed, Jun 27, 2001 at 04:03:11PM +0200, Tomasz Papszun wrote: > "/bin/ls | wc" has taken 1 (one) second. "ls | wc" lasted 3 minutes and 26 > seconds. Yes, near 3 and a half minutes! > > This is because "ls" with additional information (e.g. file type, which is > needed to colour a listing) needs more time to gather this information. > I don't know what difference would be for reiserfs or xfs filesystems.
yep. ls -l also takes a long time in large directories because it has to stat each file to get the info about it. i never bothered timing it, but in a directory with thousands of files it is significantly faster to run this: ls -1S | head -30 | xargs ls -lS ^ -- numeral 1, not letter l. than this: ls -lS | head -30 btw, in case you're wondering, i used to use commands like that to find the largest 30 files in /var/spool/mail craig -- craig sanders <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Fabricati Diem, PVNC. -- motto of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch