walking a directory with very many files

Lawrence D'Oliveiro ldo at geek-central.gen.new_zealand
Wed Jun 24 01:08:57 EDT 2009


In message <pan.2009.06.24.02.20.10 at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au>, Steven 
D'Aprano wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:29:21 -0400, Mel wrote:
> 
>> Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>> 
>>> Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>> 
>>>>> Ok, now pipe ls to less, take three days to browse through all the
>>>>> filenames to locate the file you want to see.
>>>> 
>>>> Sounds like you're approaching the issue with a GUI-centric mentality,
>>>> which is completely hopeless at dealing with this sort of situation.
>>> 
>>> Piping the output of ls to less is a GUI-centric mentality?
>> 
>> Yeah.  The "dump it on the user" idea, or more politely "can't decide
>> anything until the user has seen everything" is evident in the most
>> "characteristic" GUIs.
> 
> Perhaps you're using different GUIs to me. In my experience, most GUIs
> tend to *hide* data from the user rather than give them everything under
> the sun.

Which is getting a bit away from what we're discussing here, but certainly 
it is characteristic of GUIs to show you all 400,000 files in a directory, 
or at least try to do so, and either hang for half an hour or run out of 
memory and crash, rather than give you some intelligent way of prefiltering 
the file display up front.




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