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- Path: sparky!uunet!stanford.edu!unix!hsdndev!news.cs.umb.edu!karl
- From: karl@cs.umb.edu (Karl Berry)
- Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
- Subject: Re: Web2c and subdirectory searching
- Message-ID: <KARL.92Aug26195026@ra.cs.umb.edu>
- Date: 27 Aug 92 00:50:26 GMT
- References: <TFB.92Aug13021349@eagle.aisb.ed.ac.uk> <1992Aug13.020719.1100@maths.tcd.ie>
- <TFB.92Aug13084631@helium.aisb.ed.ac.uk>
- Sender: news@cs.umb.edu (USENET News System)
- Reply-To: karl@cs.umb.edu
- Organization: University of Massachusetts at Boston
- Lines: 52
- In-Reply-To: tfb@aisb.ed.ac.uk's message of 13 Aug 92 07: 46:31 GMT
- Nntp-Posting-Host: ra.cs.umb.edu
-
-
- find takes about 2 secs to traverse the same tree, which is still
- pretty slow, but faster than TeX.
-
- Is GNU find faster than TeX? If so, something strange is going on,
- because ...
-
- What I did find was that the code is incredibly bright about working
- out if a directory *has* subdirs -- it counts the links and assumes
- that if there are only 2 then it hasn't.
-
- ... I stole this trick (fortunately not patented yet, at least to my
- knowledge) from GNU find. A user (I forgot who, unfortunately) posted
- the fix to bug-gnu-utils.
-
- I suggest running tex under gdb (or some debugger), and seeing if in
- fact the ``incredibly bright'' code is actually working. As you
- describe your setup, the only directories that should be readdir'd are
- the top-level ones, which is only 4 or 5. Obviously it is stat-ing all
- the hundreds of input files. The question is why. If you have
- any subdirectories at all, the link-counting trick fails, and all
- directory entries must be stat-d.
-
- You also suggest one-level subdirectory searching:
-
- If there is in fact no way to get it usable, then a compromise scheme
- might be to have single-level subdir searching.
-
- This is what I implemented first (before I came across the link-counting
- trick); it got released in 5.84, I think. I don't see why this would be
- any faster than the recursive case, though, if the directory hierarchy
- is right for subdir searching. (If it isn't, you'll probably lose
- either way.)
-
- You also suggest, as a final stopgap, having TeX etc. read directory
- paths from a file. I'd prefer not to have an additional configuration
- file around for installers to have to think about.
-
- I'm not sure if I made any significant changes to the path searching
- code after I released 5.851c. But you might want to grab dvipsk.tar.Z
- or xdvik.tar.Z and copy the common files into web2c's lib/ directory,
- just in case.
-
- By the way, messages like this about web2c are usually best directed at
- me via mail (copy to the list as well if you want). It was purely
- fortuitous that I happened to be reading news for a little while before
- your article expired.
-
- Thanks for the note.
- --
- karl@cs.umb.edu
- Member of the League for Programming Freedom---write to league@prep.ai.mit.edu.
-