Abigail

The reason it should be, apart from it being suggested to be so in the find2perl manpage (hehe), is that process creation is a fairly expensive operation, and it usually is the case that all the spawnings of perl (or anything else that perl can easily duplicate in functionality) are going to slow down the entire operation enough that a single-process all-perl implementation will outpace it by a good margin. Of course, your milage may vary.

But with the use of xargs, there won't be many spawnings of perl. Furthermore, given that the number of files was supposed to be large, I'd expect the entire process to be IO bound. Finally, yeah, process creation is a fairly expensive operation, but so is calling a function in Perl. And that function will be called for each file in the directory tree, as compared to calling a perl instance for every couple of hundred files matching the criteria.

Convince me with benchmarks.

Abigail