Anything faster than stat(S)? need to determine File or Dir

[Dave Binette]

The consensus for the question "Anything faster than stat(S)?"
is "No"

Now for plan "B" (ignore me if I am trying your patience)

"Is there anything faster than opendir(S), and readdir(S)"
I can't and don't want to use  ftw(S)

Or maybe I should just ask.... WHY does it take so LONG to count the number
of directorys and files below "."

I've written a little program called "ldir" that counts files and subdirs
to the level you specify as in  "ldir -d2"  its not THAT slow but in my
application it is used a lot and speed is... well you know the story.

Tell ya what... I'll post it if you think you can do it faster, smaller
and/or better.


Here is what happens from vi when I do
!!(cd /usr/spool/news/comp; time ldir -d2 [ab]*; w)
------------------------------------------------------------
ai              (  30 Files   6 Dirs)
arch            (  64 Files   0 Dirs)
archives        (   0 Files   0 Dirs)
binaries        (+  9 Files   8 Dirs)
bugs            (+  5 Files   5 Dirs)

real         4.0
user         0.0
sys          0.5

11:05pm  up 2 days, 4 mins,  2 users,  load average: 0.19, 0.14, 0.01
------------------------------------------------------------

Subsequent invocations produce: (obviously cached)

...
real         0.8
user         0.0
sys          0.3

...
real         0.5
user         0.0
sys          0.3


Does the user time of 0.0 mean there is no hope?
Where do the other 3.5  0.5  and 0.2  seconds go?  (real - sys)

Oh yeah, we are running: (Compaq 386-20, 5Meg Ram, 2 28ms ST4096)
sysname=XENIX
nodename=norsat
release=2.3.1
version=SysV
machine=i80386

-- 
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