[snip]
> A system call which did the binary search on each directory in dirID
> order would reduce some traversal overhead, but it wouldn't be able to
Aah, but that's just the beauty of the thing.
The Mac "find file according to these criteria" call (which does not quite
implement *nix find, but something similar) does not return results sorted
in any useful order. You can see this for yourself if you use the Finder's
"Find file" dialog, which is pretty much just a user interface to that
system call.
So you _can_ simply scan the complete list sequentially. That's why it's
so fast.
MfG Kai