1. Sorting the results is a needless expense that you can do away with.

True.  But I often do it anyway, so I can follow the progress of the routine.  For instance, in this case you could ls the dir where it was operating every now and then.  Other times you might want to step through the debugger.  -- Not essential, but no harm and it can be useful (and all the io will swamp any extra time it takes).

  p