On 20 July 2017 at 21:43, Skip Montanaro <skip.montan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> scandir returns an iterator of DirEntry objects which contain more > > information than the mere name. > > > > As I recall, the motivation for scandir was to avoid subsequent system > calls, so it will be slower than listdir the way you've tested it. If you > add in the cost of fetching the other bits Terry mentioned, I suspect your > relative timing will change. > In addition, listdir() returns a list of names, so building a new list from that is fairly fast (can use a single allocation of the correct size). scandir() returns an iterator, so building a list from that may require multiple reallocations (depending on the number of entries in the directory), which could skew the test results. In neither case is building a list from the result the way you would normally use it. A more accurate test of the way both functions would normally be used would be to iterate over the results instead of eagerly building a list. In this test you would also expect scandir() to use less memory for a large directory. Tim Delaney -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
