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Full Discussion: wc vs ls
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers wc vs ls Post 302071982 by thestevew on Wednesday 26th of April 2006 06:41:54 AM
Old 04-26-2006
You can't really compare ls and wc. In simple terms:

The ls command reads UNIX's directory information - which contains the file's size and location (as well as many other things)
The wc command reads the _file_ to extract various bit of information (number of lines, characters, words)

So, ls reads information about the file whereas wc reads the file itself and, as you would expect, wc will take longer the larger the file whereas ls will not.

cheers
 
FETCH(9)						   BSD Kernel Developer's Manual						  FETCH(9)

NAME
fetch, fubyte, fuibyte, fusword, fuswintr, fuword, fuiword -- fetch data from user-space SYNOPSIS
#include <sys/types.h> #include <sys/systm.h> int fubyte(const void *base); int fusword(const void *base); int fuswintr(const void *base); long fuword(const void *base); DESCRIPTION
The fetch functions are designed to copy small amounts of data from user-space. The fetch routines provide the following functionality: fubyte() Fetches a byte of data from the user-space address base. fusword() Fetches a short word of data from the user-space address base. fuswintr() Fetches a short word of data from the user-space address base. This function is safe to call during an interrupt context. fuword() Fetches a word of data from the user-space address base. RETURN VALUES
The fetch functions return the data fetched or -1 on failure. Note that these functions all do "unsigned" access, and therefore will never sign extend byte or short values. This prevents ambiguity with the error return value for all functions except fuword(). SEE ALSO
copy(9), store(9) BUGS
The function fuword() has no way to unambiguously signal an error, because the data it reads might legitimately be the same as the -1 used to indicate an error. The other functions do not have this problem because the unsigned values returned by those can never match the -1 error return value. BSD
January 7, 1996 BSD
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