> how often do your files change? The entire XML file would not
> be continually updated only child nodes and only when requested (if built
> on the fly)
I think Windows Explorer does something similar. I bet it caches the
file/directory structure, then refreshes when you hit F5 or does a cleanup
once in a while. I know that when I delete files via the command-line, or
even using Explorer sometimes, it shows the old structure until I refresh.
Note that this would get complicated FAST...what happens if you're looking
at a CD-ROM drive and eject it? Or looking at a directory mounted over the
network and your connection dies?
Careful about using something like XML...using your example, each
directory/file description would be about 80 bytes...in my WINNT directory
alone, there are 7800 files...about 609k.
On my Linux box, find / > files.txt | wc -l reported 160243 files.
Representing this in XML would take up 12519k (80 bytes * 160243 files /
1024 bytes). Hope my math is correct...
I think one of the problems is that the people who use *nix and could write
an application similar to the one you're describing use the shell, and are
happy there. Of course, this is part of the learning curve people
encounter.
Craig
