Clarification need for VFSTransportListener scanFileOrDirectory() function..

[vijayaratha vijayasingam]

hi all;
In the vfs transport listener implementation,  scanFileOrDirectory()
function is defined to search for files in the filesystem, where to scan
children of a folder Fileobject.getChildren() function is used.
In that particular function one condition is used as follows;

  // if this is a file that would translate to a single message
                if (children == null || children.length == 0) {
                         ..........................
                      //do process

                    }
Im not quite sure , why this condition is used/for what purpose..If we
don't have any content in a folder why do we need to do  further check on
that?

Thanks
-Ratha