> *samueloph@teste:~/foo$ time ( for i in $(seq 0 9999) ; do touch $i ; done
> )real 0m10.245suser 0m3.332ssys 0m1.576s*
> Using shell built-in ">" to create 10000 files:
>
> *samueloph@teste:~/foo$ time ( for i in $(seq 0 9999) ; do > $i ; done
> )real 0m0.742suser 0m0.064ssys 0m0.120s*
>
> ">" is at least 10x faster than touch.
Your spirit of healthy scepticism is admirable but what these
tests compare is not so much the time it takes to create a file
with ">" vs touch(1) than the time it takes to create a process
relative to the time it takes for the shell to iterate through
a for() loop.
Try "seq 0 9999 | xargs touch" (3 process creations instead of
10,001). It will almost certainly be even faster than the ">"
version.