>> but i was under the impression that tree searching is just not fast
>> enough in a real production environment on VMS< simply using
>> wildcards? am i out of date? Phil demonstrated to me once that finding
>> files on the TeX Live CD was veeery slow (unless I misremember)

I don't remember; but in reality:

if the tree contains only files of interest, then VMS lib$find_file
will certainly be fast and efficient;

if the tree contains irrelevant files, then lib$find_file may well
be too slow.

Which is the situation for TDS?