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I'm trying to optimize a subroutine which uses up more than 40% of my code's runtime. I thought that using a regexp to split a line of data would be faster than calling split(), but it doesn't seem to work that way.

Here's the split:
  my ($p, $l, $o, $g, $s) = split( /\s+/, $lsl );

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and here's the regexp:

  my ($p, $l, $o, $g, $s) = ($lsl =~ 
      /^(.*?)\s+(.*?)\s+(.*?)\s+(.*?)\s+(.*)$/);

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To further slow things down, in both subroutines the value of $lsl is gotten by the following:
  my $lsl = `ls -l "$fnm" 2>&1`;

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I need all the info provided by that line, but is there a quicker way to get it?

I'm still something of a novice, so perhaps I did something unperlish. I'd appreciate any thoughts or suggestions.

Thanks!

In reply to Which witch is the quicker witch? by Dismas

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