fast file finder update

James A. Woods jaw at ames-lm.UUCP
Thu Mar 22 15:35:03 AEST 1984


#	"find, and ye shall seek" -- The Bell Labs Way

     For those who grabbed my fast find code off the net a few months
back, I am posting an improved regular expression pre-match routine to
net.sources.  Now constructions like

	find 'src*thing.c'

will work much faster.  The method and philosophy behind the modified 'find'
can be ascertained from the Usenix ;login: of February, 1983, p. 8.  Basically,
the code searches a compressed database for files given a piece of the pathname.
Representative timing for our 11/750 with a Fujitsu Eagle and an RA80: 
less than 10 user seconds for 47000 files.  This is certainly better than
groping around with 'cd' and 'ls' or using the multi-minute standard find.

     Late 4.1c tapes (early 4.2 also?) had the executable and database
installed, but no source.  The algorithm will eventually be turbocharged
for larger filesystems.

	-- James A. Woods  {dual,hplabs,hao,research}!ames-lm!jaw



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