On Thu, 4 Jul 2002, Terry Lambert wrote: [major snippage, much useful to think about here ...]
> > However, ls seems to call lstat in the same order that the files are in > > the directory, and a normal clock approach to directories would yield > > exactly the same result. Further, in the cases that the user did not want > > a -l, we would avoid adding many potentially useless names to the name > > cache and reducing its performance. > > This is because the sort occurs first. An unsorted "ls" (which is > available -- see the man page) doesn't have this issue. I don't want to start a flame war, but a truss of ls -l shows the following: getdirentries(0x5,0x809d000,0x1000,0x80990b4) = 4096 (0x1000) lstat(".gnome",0x809c248) = 0 (0x0) lstat(".mc",0x809c348) = 0 (0x0) lstat(".xinitrc",0x809c44c) = 0 (0x0) lstat("750B.pdf",0x809c54c) = 0 (0x0) lstat("Mail",0x809c648) = 0 (0x0) lstat("nsmail",0x809c748) = 0 (0x0) lstat(".cshrc",0x809c848) = 0 (0x0) lstat(".ssh",0x809c948) = 0 (0x0) lstat(".gnome_private",0x809ca50) = 0 (0x0) lstat(".xchat",0x809cb48) = 0 (0x0) lstat(".exmh",0x809cc48) = 0 (0x0) lstat(".ICEauthority",0x809cd50) = 0 (0x0) lstat(".netrc",0x809ce48) = 0 (0x0) This is the same order that 'ls -fal' produced. This suggests that the ls is doing an unsorted lookup of the info, and then sorting. That is the way I would have done it as well. Regards ----- Richard Sharpe, [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message