Date: Mon, 19 Oct 92 11:47:12 BST
From: mdr AT csg DOT cs DOT reading DOT ac DOT uk (Doc Chaos)
To: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Eric's FSF utilities

G'day

Over the weekend I got hold of Eric Backus' ports of the FSF utilities
and loaded them on my 386sx pc.  When comparing them to previous versions
of the same utilites ftp'd from SIMTEL:gnuish-msdos they all appeared
to be about 20% larger, but more importantly, took significantly longer
to run.  A simple looping test using ms-sh200 proved Eric's "ls" to take
about 5 times as long.  Closer inspection showed that there was frentic
disk activity BEFORE anything appeared on the screen - this occured with
other utilities as well, including ones which needn't access the disk at all.

Since these utils are .exe files, I presume that they aren't trying to run
my copy of go32.  I have 2Meg of memory in the machine - perhaps this
is insufficient and the utils are paging?  Would anyone like to comment on
this?  Eric, perhaps?

Mark
m DOT robinson AT reading DOT ac DOT uk