Re: Why does not rgrep use "grep -r"?

[Lennart Borgman (gmail)]

Andreas Schwab wrote:
> Miles Bader <address@hidden> writes:
>
> > I don't know the reason of the rgrep authors (though I suspect it was
> > portability concerns), but I have noticed something odd about "grep -r":
> > -- sometimes it seems _much_ slower than "find ... -type f | xargs grep"
> > on very large trees (I think I noticed with trees in NFS, where speed is
> > a perennial issue).
>
> Probably because find has been optimized for, umm, finding files.  There
> are quite a few things you can do to speed up directory traversal.


I guess it also depends on what kind of OS you are using, is process 
creation cheap or not.