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Date:	Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:45:43 -0700
From:	Brian Dessent <brian AT dessent DOT net>
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To:	cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject:	Re: copying a million tiny files?
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sam reckoner wrote:

> I'm not exaggerating. I have over one million small files that like to
> move between disks. The problem is that even getting a directory
> listing takes forever.
> 
> Is there a best practice for this?

I know it's heresy but if you just want to copy files why not use the
native XCOPY?  It will not suffer the performance degredation of having
to emulate the POSIX stat semantics on every file, just like the native
DIR command in a large directory does not take ages because it simply
uses FindFirstFile/FindNextFile which are fairly efficient (but do not
provide sufficient information to emulate POSIX.)

Brian

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