reading directory entries one by one

[Michael Hudson]

"Michael P. Soulier" <msoulier at nortelnetworks.com_.nospam> writes:

>     Greetings. 
> 
>     I'm aware that one can iterate over a directory's contents via the
> listdir() function in the os module. 
> 
>     for file in os.listdir(dir):
> 
>     However, this does read in the entire directory into memory. As a C coder,
> I can opendir and readdir and iterate the directory file by file, in case
> sucking the entire thing into memory would be too resource intensive on large
> directories.

How big are your directories?  I'd be surprised to find this was ever
an issue, but...

> Is there such an option for Python?

Don't think so.  Wouldn't be that hard, though you'd have to write
some C.  Hmm, might be a cool application of iterators.

Hmm, thinking aloud, would it be possible/nice to be able to do:

for entry in dir("/"):
    if entry.isdir():
       print "skipping", entry.basename
    elif entry.islink():
       print entry.readlink()
    else:
       print entry.basename, len(entry.open('r').read())

?  Like I said, hmm.

Cheers,
M.

-- 
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