Re: ls -l|head seems to look at all files in directory

[Reuben Thomas]

On Mon, 25 May 2009, Jim Meyering wrote:

> To do what he wants you have to know that ls -1U is the only
> way to get one output entry per readdir call.
>
> Reuben, you want to do it like this:
>
>  ls -1U|head|xargs ls -l

Thanks for the hint about -1, but this doesn't seem to make any difference: 
I run "ls -1U|head" in a directory with lots of files (about 10,000) and it 
pauses for a minute or so before giving me my ten lines of output.

If I run the command again, then of course it runs almost instantly, so I'm 
not sure what use the loops are in the tests you give.

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