On Jun 15, 2:35 am, tom <f...@thefsb.org> wrote:
> i can traverse adirectoryusing os.listdir() or os.walk(). but if
> adirectoryhas 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
> adirectoryas 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.
I might be a little late with my comment here.
David Beazley in his PyCon'2008 presentation "Generator Tricks
For Systems Programmers" had this very elegant example of handling an
unlimited numbers of files:
import os, fnmatch
def gen_find(filepat,top):
"""gen_find(filepat,top) - find matching files in directory tree,
start searching from top
expects: a file pattern as string, and a directory path as string
yields: a sequence of filenames (including paths)
"""
for path, dirlist, filelist in os.walk(top):
for name in fnmatch.filter(filelist,filepat):
yield os.path.join(path,name)
for file in gen_find('*.py', '/'):
print file
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