Re: Why does not rgrep use "grep -r"?

[Ken Raeburn <raeburn@raeburn.org>]

On Nov 2, 2007, at 21:31, Miles Bader wrote:
> "Lennart Borgman (gmail)" <lennart.borgman@gmail.com> writes:
>>> Probably because find has been optimized for, umm, finding  
>>> files.  There
>>> are quite a few things you can do to speed up directory traversal.
>>
>> I guess it also depends on what kind of OS you are using, is process
>> creation cheap or not.
>
> Neither method should use many processes unless the command-line
> arg limit is very short (though on windows, maybe that's the case...).

There may also be the issue of parallelism.  Even on a single-cpu  
system, you can queue more i/o requests in advance, or do cpu-bound  
work with data in memory while the other process is blocked on disk  
or network i/o.  (Now, if "grep -r" uses multiple threads, it may not  
be an issue...)

Ken