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