Working with large directories

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Fri, 2012-03-16 at 23:49 -0400, fred smith wrote:
> > If that were so, 'ls' would take as long as Nautilus (or Dolphin or
> > whatever) to list a large directory. I don't have any huge
> directories
> > to test, but I'm sceptical.
> 
> Hmm. you do seem to be correct:
> 
>         time ls | wc -l
>         105612
> 
>         real    0m2.582s
>         user    0m2.429s
>         sys     0m0.163s

Note that almost all the time is in "user" (presumably doing the lexical
sort) and very little in "sys" which is the actual directory traversal.

poc