[Tutor] os.path.walk vs unix find command

[Steve Willoughby]

Kent Johnson wrote:
>> Is os.popen("find") faster or slower than os.path.walk to find file pattern
>> in the

The general answer to "is find faster than os.[path.]walk faster" is "it 
depends."  Find is optimized, compiled, and fast at what it does. 
However, what it does is somewhat limited.  If you want to descend a 
filesystem doing anything complex along the way, it might be better to 
walk it from inside Python (or Perl or whatever) than to hook find up to 
other shell utilities or to create a pipe out from Python to find and 
back again.