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Frank Tobin ftobin@neverending.org
Mon Dec 10 21:13:02 2001


Mike Touloumtzis, at 11:51 -0800 on 2001-12-10, wrote:

> Seriously, there are lots of microoptimizations you could make to the Unix
> command line.  'ls' would be faster if it were integrated into the shell.
> The question is: are people willing to give up cleanliness for speed?  I
> don't think most tree walking operations are performance critical.

An O(n) factor is not a 'microoptimazation'.

> I _do_ think gnupg should be able to encrypt multiple files in one
> invocation, which it doesn't seem to be able to do now.  That way, if you
> want to amortize startup time for a tree walk which really is performace
> critical, you can pipe find's output to 'xargs -n <large number> gpg'.

This isn't clean either.  Iterators have been designed for a reason:  the
entire tree can be very big.  And you may very well likely exceed your
system's max argument length.

-- 
Frank Tobin		http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/