I just had to count how many files are in a specific directory on a AIX Obviously I run

ls -1 | wc

I knew there are lots of files but after 2-3 minutes I decided this is not a joke any more so I wrote the following: 

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my $dir = $ARGV[0] || ".";

opendir my $dh, $dir or die "Could not open '$dir'\n";
my $c =0;
$c++ while readdir $dh;
print "$c\n";

[download]
It finished in under 1 sec, printed 239982 so I could kill the other process....

Thank you.

In reply to Using Perl saves time.... by szabgab

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