Path: utzoo!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!leah!rpi!sun.soe.clarkson.edu!batcomputer!cornell!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!MARCOZ.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU!marcoz From: marcoz@MARCOZ.BOLTZ.CS.CMU.EDU (Marco Zagha) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions Subject: Re: Computational complexity of rm & ls Message-ID: <4461@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Date: 10 Mar 89 19:02:07 GMT References: <9000012@m.cs.uiuc.edu> Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI Lines: 10 In article <9000012@m.cs.uiuc.edu>, wsmith@m.cs.uiuc.edu writes: > [...] "rm *" seems to be a common > enough idiom that rm could be optimized to handle that case better. Don't forget that the shell expands the "*", not rm. All rm sees is a huge argv with one name for every file (except .* files). == Marco (marcoz@cs.cmu.edu) --