One of the reasons why cmp may not be taking so much time in this case is that most of these files are quite small (<4k). Cygwin is not like a native linux install since it runs on top of windows. I find that many tasks take much longer to complete under cygwin than in a native linux environment. One other difference for me is that I did not evaluate the output of cmp in the script as I did for the two stat operations. I just did a redirect of the cmp output to a file. As far as I understand it, cmp does not produce output when the files are the same. For stat, you are doing two calls to stat, assigning the results of both calls to shell variables, evaluating the variables in a conditional, and then printing output if the conditional evaluates true. For cmp, you are just passing the two file names to cmp. All of the lifting for cmp is done in the compiled binary, where much of what is done for stat is in the script. It may be that for small files, there isn't much difference. I didn't test this extensively. My script has run for more than 24 hours so far. I didn't think to put a counter in to print to the terminal, so I don't have any way to know how close it is to being finished. There is no output to the file yet, so nothing has been found to be different so far. At a rate of 10000 per minute, it should have finished long ago, but there are some very large files here that could take quite a while.

I don't know how long I will let this run. I am fairly well convinced that if there were problems, I would have had something report as different by now.

LMHmedchem