Hi Gary, Thanks for your reply. Do you know for sure that this should be significantly faster, or were you just guessing? You didn't say which particular API you had in mind, but some reading has led me to the fts APIs. These appear to be about 20% faster than NSFileManager (I specified FTS_NAMEONLY). Better than a kick in the teeth, but still seems to me like it might be possible to do it faster.
I measured about 2.5 seconds for a directory on a "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)" external USB3 hard disk containing 110,000 files with names around 15 characters long. I don't know much about how filesystems are structured, so this information may not be all in one place, but that should represent less than 1MB/s of data read in order to get a list of all the filenames in the directory. Maybe this is as good as it's going to get, but it would be great to know if there is a better way. Jonny. On 13 Nov 2015, at 16:54, Gary L. Wade <garyw...@desisoftsystems.com> wrote: > Try going down a level to the BSD layer APIs for directory contents traversal. > -- > Gary L. Wade (Sent from my iPad) > http://www.garywade.com/ > >> On Nov 13, 2015, at 8:28 AM, Jonathan Taylor <jonathan.tay...@glasgow.ac.uk> >> wrote: >> >> Hi all, >> >> I want to be able to identify quickly (programatically) how many image files >> reside in a particular directory. At present I call: >> [NSFileManager defaultManager] contentsOfDirectoryAtPath:dir error:nil]; >> and then examine the type suffixes (which in comparison is very quick). When >> looking at a directory over a network or on an external drive, the >> NSFileManager call can take several seconds for a directory containing 18k >> files of which half are images. >> >> These sorts of numbers are in fact a common use case for me, and I would >> like to avoid this delay. This is for preview information in an NSOpenPanel, >> so I don't want to make things this unresponsive - but at the same time it >> is very useful to have access to this information for the preview. >> >> Can anybody advise on a quicker way of achieving what I want to achieve? The >> fact that 'ls' takes almost as long makes me think this is probably a fairly >> insurmountable problem, but at the same time the quantity of information >> transferred (of the order of 200k of data) should not take 2 seconds to >> transfer, so in that sense it doesn't seem unreasonable to try and see if >> there is a faster way. >> >> I would prefer to get the filenames themselves, but I could settle for just >> a count of the total number of files (of any kind) in the directory *and* >> the ability to get the paths of just the first few files in the directory, >> if there might be a faster way of doing that. >> >> Thanks for any suggestions >> Jonny _______________________________________________ Cocoa-dev mailing list (Cocoa-dev@lists.apple.com) Please do not post admin requests or moderator comments to the list. Contact the moderators at cocoa-dev-admins(at)lists.apple.com Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: https://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/cocoa-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com This email sent to arch...@mail-archive.com
