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folder: finding subdirs quickly

1995-07-21 17:03:27
[This is getting interesting, so I've added mh-workers.]

Thanks for doing the experiment with the "folder" program.  It is sad
that symbolic links mess up the link count that st_nlinks gives you.
It seemed like such a speed win at first.

We could fall back to another idea I had: pass flags to "folder"
stating rules that your MH folder tree follows.  We already have one,
"-norecurse", but we could use some finer tuning.

For example, if I have folders only two levels deep, I could pass
"-maxdepth 2", and then folder wouldn't have to stat all the messages
in second-level folders looking for further subfolders.

Or I could commit to having either messages or subfolders in a folder,
but not both.  Thus if I pass "-pure", as soon as folder comes to any
message, it knows to stop searching this directory for subfolders.

There could even be a "-nosymlinks" flag that says it is okay to use
the st_nlinks counting method because there are no symlinks to folders.

 < Stephen


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