Solaris

I just need to see any number of random files to see the owner, group and permissions information since all the files in the directory have the same permissions and ownership information. Is it possible just to list any 5 files without going thru the series of commands such as "ls -ltu | head -5" since they all have to be processed in a sequential order and take more time than just getting the output of the 'ls'. For me the 'list' command itself takes a while to display due to the high number of files.

I just checked Solaris 10.. It's not working there.

First of all, thank you so much for your reply.
Well, running your command in the directory returned a warning as below. BTW, it doesn't have to five. One will do it as well.

Code:

find . -type f -ls -quit
find: bad option -quit
find: [-H | -L] path-list predicate-list

Well.. you could use some dirty hack solution: In one session run

Code:

find . -type f -ls

In another kill it with

Code:

pkill find

or something similar.

That is a good trick. Thanks a lot for your thoughts.

You can also cancel the execution with "CTRL-C". The "pkill" version is for the case when that wouldn't work (like too much output going to the screen, etc).

FWIW - rebuild the directories. When one directory has a large number of files it becomes progressively slower when you issue an ls command. To the point where it becomes usable.

The short answer to the question is to write C (or perl), use dirent (opendir(), readdir(), closedir() ) read just five files.

Does the ownership of the directory tell you nothing that will let you make a smart guess on something like this:

Code:

ls -l [I already know this filename]

This is lots faster to begin with. Directory entries are hashed in ZFS. ufs does that as well.