RE: rm feature: don't attempt to remove the same file twice

[Ed Avis]

Adam Brenner asked:

>if I do rm -rf * in a directory with
>thousands of file, folders, links, sockets, etc. should rm keep all
>the names in memory?

The argument list already has to fit into memory - so the extra memory usage 
would be keeping another copy of it in a sorted array for fast lookup.
(Given that the argument list is fixed, a more elaborate data structure which 
is optimized for inserting or removing elements is probably not needed.)

Or if you want to avoid memory allocation altogether, just use the existing 
in-memory copy of the argument list and linear search.
The checking of whether a file has been seen before, since it is only a 
nice-to-have, could be skipped if the argument list is long (>1000).

-- 
Ed Avis <address@hidden>


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