You're right, find won't call stat() unless it needs to. It doesn't need to for recursing through the directory tree because readdir() returns dirent.d_type th

You're right, find won't call stat() unless it needs to. It doesn't need to for recursing through the directory tree because readdir() returns dirent.d_type these days to determine if a name is a directory. Yes, those stat() calls can be very slow in aggregate on a large tree, especially from HDD (due to seeking) or network filesystem, if the stat information isn't already in cache.