Method and System for Improving the Performance of Commands that Work across Multiple File Systems (02-Feb-2010)

Method and System for Improving the Performance of Commands that Work across Multiple File Systems

A method and system for improving the performance of commands that work across multiple file systems is disclosed. The method includes finding a starting directory and determining file systems that are needed for executing a command such as, a search command. The method further includes running a separate command on each file system in parallel.

Commands that work across multiple file systems take a lot of time for execution because of an increase in the number of files in file systems. An example of such a command that works across multiple file systems is the "find" command. As the find command searches the directory tree in a single threaded manner, it may take hours to get through all of the files.

The method and system disclosed herein allows the find command to run as a separate find command for each file system that needs to be searched. Thus, each separate find command runs in parallel improving the performance tremendously. Similarly, performance of any other UNIX*/Linux** command that is used to search through the directory structure may also be improved.

In order to run the find command as a separate find command for each file system, the file systems are determined using a "df" command. Thereafter, a starting directory is determined by breaking down options issued in the find command. Subsequently, the file systems that need to be searched are identified. A user may enter the starting directory in any format in order to run the find command as a separate find command for each file system. For example, the user may enter an absolute directory such as "/" or "/home". The user may also enter a relative directory such as "mydir" or "../../startdir".

The starting directory is converted to an absolute directory or a relative directory in order to match the starting directory to the mounted file systems. A built-in Perl*** function may be utilized to convert the starting directory into the absolute directory or the relative directory. After converting to the absolute directory path, each m...