Duy Nguyen authored Nov 24, 2012 and Junio C Hamano committed Nov 26, 2012

When a pattern contains only a single asterisk as wildcard,
e.g. "foo*bar", after literally comparing the leading part "foo" with
the string, we can compare the tail of the string and make sure it
matches "bar", instead of running fnmatch() on "*bar" against the
remainder of the string.

-O2 build on linux-2.6, without the patch:

$ time git rev-list --quiet HEAD -- '*.c'

real    0m40.770s
user    0m40.290s
sys     0m0.256s

With the patch

$ time ~/w/git/git rev-list --quiet HEAD -- '*.c'

real    0m34.288s
user    0m33.997s
sys     0m0.205s

The above command is not supposed to be widely popular. It's chosen
because it exercises pathspec matching a lot. The point is it cuts
down matching time for popular patterns like *.c, which could be used
as pathspec in other places.

Signed-off-by: Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy <pclouds@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>