John Summerfield wrote:
Matthias Czapla wrote:On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 09:05:54AM +0800, John Summerfield wrote:I don't use -exec on find any more because it's slow. When you pipe the names into xargs as I do, then spaces cause the problem I described.Well, until now I didnt even know about xargs' purpose, thanks for the pointer.For slowness, consider this: summer@Dolphin:~$ find ~ -type f | wc -l 886076 summer@Dolphin:~$ find ~ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 | wc -l 3990You're right, xargs is faster (60 times in the case of ls), but only ifthe actual command isn't doing very much. For md5sum there is practicallyno difference in speed (have just done some measurements).I think the results will depend.... md5sum isn't the smallest binary around, but there are larger ones too.If md5sum gets cached, that's RAM you can't use for something else for a while. If not, it may be larger than the files you're handling.If you're processing a lot of small files, the difference will be huge. If you're processing 700 Mbyte ISOs or 9.4 Gbyte DVD images, the difference will be immeasurably small.Oh, stuff. source of debs, built and otherwise. CVS checkouts of stuff. Documents. Photos (see my sig for some). IBM operating systems.BTW, what are all those files in your home directory? I have only about 14000 and thought that this is the biggest mess ever ;)Lotsa stuff. 12 Gbytes of stuff. Too much stuff.
Since I'm kinda new at this I just have to ask what's wrong with a
for-loop..
To slow?
I have no idea, but I use something like this to recurse down a tree and
do something with every file:
#!/bin/bash
for i in `find -type f`
do
whatever you wan't to do, just use $i instead of the filename.
done
Regards
Sturla