I just did a comparison of the copying speed of shutil.copy against the speed of a direct windows copy using os.system. I copied a file that was 1083 KB.
I'm very interested to see that the shutil.copy copyfileobj implementation of hacking through the file and writing a new one is significantly faster... any clue as to why this is? I figure I'm missing something here. Does os.system launch a cmd shell every time? >>> import timeit >>> timeit.Timer(stmt= r'shutil.copy(r"c:\windows\ntbtlog.txt", >>> r"c:\temp")',setup="import shutil").repeat(repeat=5,number=100) [0.99285104671434965, 0.68337121058721095, 0.84528340892575216, 0.87780765432398766, 0.8709894693311071] >>> timeit.Timer(stmt= r'os.system(r"copy c:\windows\ntbtlog.txt >>> c:\temp")',setup="import os").repeat(repeat=5,number=100) [2.8546278926514788, 2.3763950446300441, 2.4444609580241377, 2.4392499605455669, 2.4446956247265916] -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
