The trouble with your approach is in the title: millions of files. On most Linux systems I've used, ls will allocate some amount of memory for each file (presumably so it can sort the listing). Perl could be used as a lightweight wrapper for the opendir library function.

However, as ruzam pointed out, the first script isn't much better than ls in that regard. His approach is O(1) in the number of files, a variation of which I've personally used in situations similar to jsiren's.

In reply to Re^2: Managing a directory with millions of files by mpeg4codec
in thread Managing a directory with millions of files by jsiren

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