Martin v. Löwis <mar...@v.loewis.de> added the comment: > The downsides of os.listdir: a) You can't get a peek at the files so > far, it's all or nothing. I only wanted to know if a directory is > empty and I have to read the whole thing just to throw it away (maybe > I missed another library function?)
This depends somewhat on the operating system. On Unix, doing os.stat on the directory, then looking on st_nlink, will tell you whether the directory is empty (st_nlink is 2 on an empty directory). > b) Using it in a GUI basically requires you to use threads if you may > run into a dir with many files. Especially on a slow filesystem > (network). Because you won't regain control until the whole thing is > read. Hmm. In a GUI, you would typically want to sort the file names by some criterion, which typically requires you to read all files (even if you then only display some of them). > I would like to have an iterator version as well, but I also dislike > another function (especially the "x" prefix). How about adding a > keyword argument to select iterator behaviour? I still would like to see a demonstrable improvement in a real-world application. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue11406> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com