On Apr 29, 2009, at 8:35, William L. Maltby wrote: > One thing to keep in mind is that ls must sort the file list. If the > system load is high and memory is short, you may be getting into a > swap > situation. I suggest trying the test when the system is lightly loaded > to see if the results differ. This might be especially significant if > you have a large number of concurrent users doing lots of things. If sorting is the issue, what happens if you do an "ls -1U" (one file per line and unsorted)? Is that a lot faster? Alfred