Someone

alphaone@elara ~/foo $ time ll |wc -l
1534779

real  0m34.317s
user  0m24.998s
sys 0m8.379s
alphaone@elara ~/foo $ time ll *
bash: /bin/ls: Argument list too long

real  0m23.808s
user  0m22.719s
sys 0m0.893s
alphaone@elara ~/foo $ time find . |xargs ls -l

real  1m52.543s
user  0m51.100s
sys 0m27.278s
alphaone@elara ~/foo $ time find . |xargs rm
rm: cannot remove directory `.'

real  0m10.338s
user  0m4.490s
sys 0m5.520s
alphaone@elara ~/foo $ ll
total 0