Shell Programming and Scripting

Ampsys,

Perhaps find is being more thorough than you. It is a very good tool, and better than using ls -1 and then mangling the output yourself.

Consider that find will descend directories and look at your directory structure to see how that might affect you. If you have many sub-directories and then more within that along with many many files, then find will be trawling them all because that is what you will have asked it to do.

If you don't want to use all the strengths of find, you can turn them off if you wish. If you have a poor directory design, then that is not the fault of find

This isn't really the place to complain about tools that run slowly because of your poor design.


Robin

If ls -1 is convenient for you then you should compare with a flat run

Code:

find . \! -name . -prune -print

ls will wait hours then coredump on a large enough directory -- because it sorts, all the time, and that can't be turned off. find will never pull that trick on you. and returns results immediately.

If you know how to use it, find is extremely reliable. Its options are admittedly tricky.

You can turn off sorting in ls when you use the -f option, but that has side effects (-f turns on -a, and the results are unspecified in you use -f with -l and a few other options).