Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!watmath!iuvax!rutgers!psuvax1!flee From: flee@shire.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) Newsgroups: comp.unix.wizards Subject: Re: Long filenames Message-ID: Date: 8 Jun 89 18:33:58 GMT References: <106326@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <4315@ficc.uu.net> <338@arc.UUCP> <629@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <4439@ficc.uu.net> Sender: news@psuvax1.cs.psu.edu Organization: Penn State University Computer Science Lines: 23 In article <4439@ficc.uu.net>, peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes: > You need lots of long file names. > 'ls -C' is useless. > 'ls' takes forever. 'ls -C' is only useless on pathologically small terminals (such as 24x80 :-). The columnizer could also be improved to let exceptionally long names violate column boundaries. 'ls' takes forever only if you use the '-l', '-F', or similar options that have to stat() each file. 'ls' without those options is marginally slower than 'sort'. Curiously, 'csh' filecompletion listing is quite fast, much faster than 'ls -F'. This is mostly illusion. 'ls' stats each file as it reads the directory and then prints the list out. 'csh' reads the directory and then stats each file as it's printed out. The effect is that 'csh' seems faster because of the better average response time. 'ls' could do something similar with specialcase code (albeit the most common case). Might be worth it. -- Felix Lee flee@shire.cs.psu.edu *!psuvax1!shire!flee