On Sun, 14 Jun 2009 22:35:50 +0200, Andre Engels wrote: > On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 6:35 PM, tom<f...@thefsb.org> wrote: >> 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. > > What kind of directories are those that just a list of files would > result in a "very large" object? I don't think I have ever seen > directories with more than a few thousand files...
You haven't looked very hard :) $ pwd /home/steve/.thumbnails/normal $ ls | wc -l 33956 And I periodically delete thumbnails, to prevent the number of files growing to hundreds of thousands. -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
