ls -l takes a forever to finish.

[James Harrison]

On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 09:44 -0600, Mark Evans wrote:
> No we are not using NIS.
> 
> it is a large directory i am listing.  actually it is the /usr/home 
> directory, and is probably the largest on the system. However "ls -l" runs 
> for close to six minutesand spends the 10 seconds scrolling the screen with 
> the results.  so i wait ls to start showing the results for about 5 and a 
> half minutes.   Even on a older and much slower system i've never seen it 
> talk more than 15 seconds to complete.
> 
> 
> Thanks
> Mark
> 


How many directories, roughly? I've seen ls take *many* minutes listing
the contents of a directory that contained tens of thousands of files.