Why is find so slow (Re: Why use find?)

[Paul Tomblin]

flee at guardian.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) writes:
>"descend" is fast because it recognizes leaf directories and avoids
>stat()ing the files in that directory.  This is usually a big win,
>since most files tend to be in leaf directories.

>"find" can't do this in general, since most of its predicates require
>stat()ing each file, but it wouldn't be too hard to add lazy stat()ing
>to find.  And it may even be worth it.

What happened to "ftw", that was discussed at Usenix a few years ago?

Is it getting into unix distributions?  Are programs like "find" and 
"ls -R" being re-implemented using it, like they're supposed to?

It sure sounded like it was a cure for what ails find when it was
described.
-- 
Paul Tomblin, Department of Redundancy Department.    ! My employer probably 
I'm not fat..... I'm metabolically challenged.        ! does not agree with my
I'm not underpaid... I'm financially challenged.      ! opinions.... 
nrcaer!cognos!geovision!pt or uunet!geovision!pt      ! Me neither.