Now, I'm about as far from expert on Perl's guts as possible, but I can see two possibilities:

  1. It takes more time for Perl to backtrack for underscore (_) to $path than it takes to make the query (not impossible)
  2. The version of Perl you're using doesn't optimize the different -X queries against the same file, and has to repeat the query each time. It takes some time to connect the "_" with the explicit filename.

I suspect the first hypothesis is more likely. After all, getting information about files is an extremely common operation in any O/S, and I would think it would be one which the O/S programmers would try very hard to make very fast.

added in update

Or, of course, I'm completely off the mark and you should listen to Fletch.

emc

e(π√−1) = −1

In reply to Re: Use of undescore to reuse file stat data is slower by swampyankee
in thread Use of undescore to reuse file stat data is slower by Anonymous Monk

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