Tim Pinkawa wrote: > I realize four lines of Python does not replicate the functionality of > which exactly. It was intended to give the original poster something > to start with.
Agreed! > I am curious about it being slow, though. Is there a faster way to get > the contents of a directory than os.listdir() or is there a faster way > to see if an element is in a list other than "x in y"? I believe > 'which' will terminate once it finds any match, which mine does not, > but that can be fixed by adding a break after the print. You don't need to get the entire directory content to see if a file exists. The stat() syscall is much faster because it requires fewer disk reads. On modern file systems stat() is a O(1) operation while "file" in listdir() is a O(n) operation. By the way you need the result of os.stat anyway to see if the file has the executable bits set. Christian -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list