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Date: Sat, 23 Oct 2004 13:39:13 +0200
From: "Eli Zaretskii" <eliz AT gnu DOT org>
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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In-reply-to: <1k_dd.17187$nj.2376@newssvr13.news.prodigy.com>
	(one2001boy AT yahoo DOT com)
Subject: Re: latest ls.exe version in XP problem
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> From: "one2001boy AT yahoo DOT com" <one2001boy AT yahoo DOT com>
> Date: Fri, 22 Oct 2004 02:33:33 GMT
> 
> under Windows XP in directory C:\windows\system32, I
> have 2558 File(s).
> 
> run ls -F, I wait for 16 seconds, and then screen start to display
> the files and directories.

Can you tell how much time it takes on the same machine, and in the
same directory, to run "ls" (without the -F option)?

The reason I'm asking this is because on XP, whenever any DOS program
is run, Windows needs to start a DOS emulation, load and process the
AUTOEXEC.NT file, and do other time-consuming chores.  That makes any
DJGPP program look generally sluggish on XP.

> The computer I am running is Pentium 4, 3.0 Ghz, with 512 Meg.

I tried this on a laptop with 993-MHz Pentium III and 256 MB of main
memory, running XP SP1a, and got the following responses: "ls -F"
starts displaying after 10 seconds when I run it on WINDOWS\SYSTEM32
directory first time, and after only 3 seconds when I run it on the
same directory afterwards (because the directory contents is already
in the Windows disk cache).  Just "ls" starts displaying after 1
second.  This system has 1844 files (including 41 subdirectories) in
its WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 directory.

The same "ls -F" command on a 450-MHz box running Windows 98 (1151
files in the WINDOWS\SYSTEM directory) takes 7 seconds.

So it sounds like the CPU speed is not important here.  What matters
is the file-system efficiency.

Also, the fact that "ls -F" takes a while in such a huge directory is
not really news to me.  We are lucky such directories are rare.

Bottom line, I suggest to use "ls --color" to find out file
attributes.  It is faster because it only looks at the files'
file-name extensions, but does not read the first few bytes to look
for the magic signature if the extension does not reveal the file's
type.  That will miss a few rare executable files if the LS_COLORS
variable doesn't catch them.