Re: Faster ls when there are thousands of files in a directory

[Jim Meyering]

Peng Yu wrote:
> When there are a few thousands of files/directories in a directory
> that I want to ls, I experience long wait time (a few seconds on mac).
> I'm wondering if some kind of cache can be built for ls to speed it
> up? Note my ls is installed from macport (not the native mac ls).

Use "ls -1U" (efficient with coreutils-7.0 or newer) or find.

Someday GNU ls will use fts, and then it will benefit from
the inode-sorting fts does for some FS types when there are
very many files.  Then it will be faster with additional
combinations of options.  But even then, it won't beat "ls -1U",
which doesn't call stat at all for FS with useful dirent.d_type.