Subject: Re: ls -p very slow
From: [email-masked] (Chad Loder)

6 Nov 1997 14:16:17 -0800
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To: Larry Hall <[email-masked]>
Cc: Earnie Boyd <[email-masked]>, [email-masked],
        [email-masked]

On Wed, 5 Nov 1997, Larry Hall wrote:

> I think Sergey has the right idea with his implementation.  It has always 
> seemed to me the a symbolic link an attribute of the file.  Certainly, if
> someone replaces the current symbolic link implamentation with one that
> makes use of shortcuts, the implementation will still need to either open
> the short cut file to figure out its a shortcut or base the determination
> on some extension to the file name (i.e. .lnk).  I'd be surprosed to find
> that shortcut files are significantly faster to open than any other type
> of file so I can't see much benefit to a change in this regard.  Using some

My whole point was, Sergey's aproach is an improvement over looking through
*every* file, but you still have to open and close every file with the system
attribute set. You would get a performance boost by having one hidden, system
file created in the directory which contains a table (or a tree) of symbolic
links for that directory. Hey, that way, when you look at the directory using
Windows, you don't see a bunch of files you can't use. You see at most one.

If the code is set up correctly (I admit I haven't looked at it), then you
should only need to change one or two procedures when you change how
symbolic links are looked up, and all the programs which call the procedures
will not need to be changed. Chances are, it's not set up that way, tho. :)

Might not be worth it. You might only get a performance boost in listing
situations, but when you cd to a symbolic dir or more a symbolic file, it
might actually be slower. :)

-chad

----------------------------------------------------
| Chad Loder - Somerville, MA, USA                 |
| EMail:     [email-masked]                        |
| Home Page: http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/cloder    |
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