On 06/12/2016 12:26, Chris Angelico wrote:
On Tue, Dec 6, 2016 at 10:56 PM, BartC <b...@freeuk.com> wrote:
In that directory (which was on Windows but accessible via a virtual Linux),
typing any Linux command followed by * would have required all 3.4 million
directory entries to be accessed in order to build a 3.4 million-element
argv list. I've no idea how long that would have taken.
I just asked Python to build me a 4-million-element list, and it took
no visible time - a small fraction of a second. Don't be afraid of
large argument lists. We're not writing 8088 Assembly Language
programs in 64KB of working memory here.
Haven't people been saying that Unix has been doing this for 40 years?
Some systems /did/ have little memory, and while there won't have been
the capacity for that many files, some file devices were slow.
--
Bartc
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