Is there an alternative to os.walk?

waylan waylan at gmail.com
Wed Oct 4 15:06:56 EDT 2006


Bruce wrote:
> Hi all,
> I have a question about traversing file systems, and could use some
> help. Because of directories with many files in them, os.walk appears
> to be rather slow. I`m thinking there is a potential for speed-up since
> I don`t need os.walk to report filenames of all the files in every
> directory it visits. Is there some clever way to use os.walk or another
> tool that would provide functionality like os.walk except for the
> listing of the filenames?

You might want to check out the path module [1] (not os.path). The
following is from the docs:

> The method path.walk() returns an iterator which steps recursively
> through a whole directory tree. path.walkdirs() and path.walkfiles()
> are the same, but they yield only the directories and only the files,
> respectively.

Oh, and you can thank Paul Bissex for pointing me to path [2].

[1]: http://www.jorendorff.com/articles/python/path/
[2]: http://e-scribe.com/news/289




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