ls | wc -l has more problems, e.g. \n is a legal character in filenames.
-emg On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 1:36 AM, Nick <suckless-...@njw.me.uk> wrote: > Quoth Martti Kühne: >> On Thu, Jul 18, 2013 at 9:00 PM, Galos, David >> <galos...@students.rowan.edu> wrote: >> > Based on the discussion in 'coreutils / moreutils - DC a directory counter' >> > I have optimized sbase ls to easily handle large directories. The major >> > change is that ls no longer calls 'lstat' on files if it does not have to. >> > >> > This patch also add '-U' which keeps the list from being sorted. When using >> > '-U', ls is constant (except for an argv duplicate) memory. >> >> >> While we're at it, why not fully remove the necessity of wc -l? > > Because 'wc -l' is a much better way to do things in the general > case. Remember, "do one thing and do it well". As has already been > discussed to death, it's only very unusually large directories that > using regular ls|wc -l isn't a reasonable thing to do. But even if > it was always slow, this would be the wrong thing to do. >
