Question

I have about a million files for which I need to get the filename, size, and date modified.

Is there any improvement that can be done, performance-wise, on the following command to get this information?

find ./ -exec ls -lh {} \;

Note: I can exclude files such as “.file”, “.trash/”, and any folders themselves (i.e., I only need the file information).

Update:

Here are the results:

$ time (find . -ls)
real    0m5.947s
user    0m0.393s
sys     0m0.682s

$ time (ls -lhR)
real    0m14.208s
user    0m0.978s
sys     0m2.510s

$ time (find ./ -exec ls -lh {} \;)
way too long

Answer 1

Yes, quite a bit. Faster alternatives include:

• Running the ls command in larger batches than one file at a time:

  find . -print0 | xargs -0 ls -lh
  

• Having find do the file listing instead of a separate ls command:

  find . -ls
  

• Skipping find altogether and having ls run recursively:

  ls -lhR