Re: using mapfile is extreamly slow compared to oldfashinod ways to read files

[Matthew Woehlke]

Chet Ramey wrote:
> I'm sure there are efficiency improvements possible in the bash indexed
> array implementation, but sequentially accessing a data structure
> optimized for space and sparse arrays is never going to be as fast as
> a read-process loop, and that difference becomes more and more apparent
> the larger the array.

Maybe bash should remember the last position to optimize accessing the 
next element?

There are also always hash tables, which are a bit more expensive in 
memory use, but would provide faster lookups (and I /really/ hope you're 
using a hash - or at least some kind of tree - and not a list for 
named-element arrays!).

--
Matthew
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