waling a directory with very many files

[tom]

i can traverse a directory using os.listdir() or os.walk(). but if a
directory has a very large number of files, these methods produce very
large objects talking a lot of memory.

in other languages one can avoid generating such an object by walking
a directory as a liked list. for example, in c, perl or php one can
use opendir() and then repeatedly readdir() until getting to the end
of the file list. it seems this could be more efficient in some
applications.

is there a way to do this in python? i'm relatively new to the
language. i looked through the documentation and tried googling but
came up empty.