Problem with ls on home directory

On Sat, 29 Apr 2006 11:14:18 -0400, Geico Caveman staggered into the Black Sun and said:

How many files-dirs are in your ~? ls has to sort all the filenames according to locale and then combine them so they display efficiently in a multicolumn format. ls is often aliased to "ls --color=tty" , so the filenames may have to be colorized as well. All this takes a fair amount of time if you have 10,000 or more files in your ~. In that case, "ls -1" or redirecting ls's output to a file will be much faster than normal ls.

If an app needs to display things in a GUI file selector, it has to do much the same things as ls does. Which version of which distro are you running? Which filesystem are you using forhome ? (ReiserFS is more efficient than ext3 for directories with large numbers of files in them.)

just "strace ls". Doing the latter is usually not useful as there's too much info in strace logs to fit well on an xterm. (straceing "Hello, World" produces 17 lines; real programs tend to produce *at least* 10 times that!)

-- Matt GThere is no Darkness in Eternity-But only Light too dim for us to see Brainbench MVP for Linux Admin mail: TRAP + SPAN don't belong ----------------------------- penguins, is Tux." --MegaHAL