find: Leaf Optimisation
7.1 Leaf Optimisation
=====================
Files in Unix file systems have a link count which indicates how many
names point to the same inode. Directories in Unix filssytems have a
'..' entry which functions as a hard link to the parent directory and a
'.' entry which functions as a link to the directory itself. The '..'
entry of the root directory also points to the root. This means that
'find' can deduce the number of subdirectories a directory has, simply
by subtracting 2 from the directory's link count. This allows 'find'
saving 'stat' calls which would otherwise be needed to discover which
directory entries are subdirectories.
File systems which don't have these semantics should simply return a
value less than 2 in the 'st_nlinks' member of 'struct stat' in response
to a successful call to 'stat'.
If you are building 'find' for a system on which the value of
'st_nlinks' is unreliable, you can specify '--disable-leaf-optimisation'
to 'configure' to prevent this assumption being made.
Info Catalog
find: Configuration
find: d_type Optimisation