Sorry, I still don't get it -- I don't understand what either "lots of small files" or "stuff like fork()" have to do with this. Are those really the reason tha

Sorry, I still don't get it -- I don't understand what either "lots of small files" or "stuff like fork()" have to do with this. Are those really the reason that "git bash", a single command line interpreting shell, runs single commands like 'ls -l *.txt" or "cd ../../uncle_dir/cousin_dir" as if it was stuck in a mixture of tar and molasses? (Do any processes have to be forked to switch my pwd? And it wasn't really all that many .txt files! :-) Oh well, my entire data set is N=2, so anecdata rather than any wide-reaching survey; could well be pure coincidence. It just struck me as I started a new job last Monday, got a new Windows work laptop and started the arduous process of installing required (and allowed) software on it, how uncanny the similarities between corporate computing environments are... Right down to this apparent slowness on the MING-64 command line.