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From: James Harrison <jamesh@lanl.gov>
To: Mark Evans <mbe2@bayou.com>
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Date: Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:04:19 -0700
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Cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: ls -l takes a forever to finish.
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On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 09:44 -0600, Mark Evans wrote:
> No we are not using NIS.
> 
> it is a large directory i am listing.  actually it is the /usr/home 
> directory, and is probably the largest on the system. However "ls -l" runs 
> for close to six minutesand spends the 10 seconds scrolling the screen with 
> the results.  so i wait ls to start showing the results for about 5 and a 
> half minutes.   Even on a older and much slower system i've never seen it 
> talk more than 15 seconds to complete.
> 
> 
> Thanks
> Mark
> 


How many directories, roughly? I've seen ls take *many* minutes listing
the contents of a directory that contained tens of thousands of files.