ls -l

[Don Steiny]

/ hpcupt1:comp.unix.questions / reeder at ut-emx.UUCP (William P. Reeder) /  3:26 pm  Nov 30, 1988 /
In article <838 at nih-csl.UUCP>, ted at nih-csl.UUCP (ted persky) writes:
>> it seems that, even for long directory listings, the command takes a very short
>> amount of time to complete, considering all the file opening and closing I guess

>My experience has been that ls can take a very long time to run on
>large directories.  Several posters have already explained that ls
>doesn't have to open each file in the directory; 

	To display the user name, it needs to map the uid to the name
in the /etc/passwd file.   On systems with many users this can take
a long time.