Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!news From: flee@guardian.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) Newsgroups: comp.unix.shell Subject: Re: Leaf directories (Re: Why is find so slow) Message-ID: Date: 12 Oct 90 22:35:47 GMT References: <15052@hydra.gatech.EDU> Sender: news@cs.psu.edu (Usenet) Organization: Penn State Computer Science Lines: 14 Nntp-Posting-Host: guardian.cs.psu.edu Leaf directories are directories with no subdirectories. A leaf directory has a link count <= 2. Consider running "find" on a directory /tex/lib/fonts which contains 8472 plain files. Since /tex/lib/fonts is a leaf directory, you can't descend any deeper, so you don't need to stat() any of the 8472 files to look for subdirectories. The difference in speed is similar to the difference between saying ls /tex/lib/fonts and ls -F /tex/lib/fonts -- Felix Lee flee@cs.psu.edu