Post #3362366

Okay, I hit a crazy #OpenBSD (or possibly Perl) peculiarity today. For background context, OpenBSD's pkg_* tools are all written in Perl. Testing stuff in a discussion with @rl_dane@polymaths.social, I had cause to throw ktrace on the pkg_info command like $ ktrace -f pkg_info.ktrace pkg_info -Q remind All said, fairly boring. But when I was browsing through the dump $ kdump -R -f pkg_info.ktrace | less I found that it did a stat(2) call on every single file in my current working directory: $ kdump -f pkg_info.ktrace -R | awk '/NAMI *"\./{++c; print}END{print "Total count:", c}' This means that pkg_info runs noticeably faster in an empty directory than if run in a directory containing tens of thousands of files, especially if the machine uses a spinning-rust HDD rather than flash storage. I haven't read the pkg_info source code deeply since I don't natively do perl, so I'm uncertain whether pkg_info is intentionally stat'ing every file, or whether perl just does this as part of its startup, but it seemed like a really weird behavior..