File checker: A summary

[Henry Spencer]

In article <16608 at brl-adm.ARPA> dsill at nswc-oas.arpa (Dave Sill) writes:
>1) Two people suggested short awk/ls/diff-based scripts.  For my
>purposes, this is inadequate.  I need to check about 1500 files and
>any form of shell script would just be too slow.

Did you try it?  It ain't necessarily so.  Ignoring the annoying problem
of argument lists being too long, this should be

	ls -... lotsafiles | awk '...' | diff - whatitoughttobe

which ought to be amply fast unless you're running this thing every five
minutes.  Kind of academic since you do have a C solution, but automatically
dismissing shell-and-filters solutions as "too slow" is a sign of ignorance.
Well-done shell programs are often fast enough.
-- 
MSDOS is not dead, it just     |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
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