jaw@ames-lm.UUCP (James A. Woods) (03/22/84)
# "find, and ye shall seek" -- The Bell Labs Way
For those who grabbed my fast find code off the net a few months
back, I am posting an improved regular expression pre-match routine to
net.sources. Now constructions like
find 'src*thing.c'
will work much faster. The method and philosophy behind the modified 'find'
can be ascertained from the Usenix ;login: of February, 1983, p. 8. Basically,
the code searches a compressed database for files given a piece of the pathname.
Representative timing for our 11/750 with a Fujitsu Eagle and an RA80:
less than 10 user seconds for 47000 files. This is certainly better than
groping around with 'cd' and 'ls' or using the multi-minute standard find.
Late 4.1c tapes (early 4.2 also?) had the executable and database
installed, but no source. The algorithm will eventually be turbocharged
for larger filesystems.
-- James A. Woods {dual,hplabs,hao,research}!ames-lm!jaw