On Thursday 28 October 2004 23:45, David Brown wrote:
> Well, in "ordinary" filesystems, stat and friends don't generally
> take very much time, which is probably why they aren't blocking.

Not quite, there is the cd reader; on a newly inserted cdrom for 
example: 

vincenzo@ronzinante vincenzo $ cd /mnt/cdrom
vincenzo@ronzinante cdrom $ time stat .
[...]

real    0m11.966s

this is also a problem with the Unix.LargeFile module of course. 

Vincenzo

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