On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 8:42 PM, Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 29, 2008 at 8:10 PM, Tim Heaney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Speaking of this, is it too late to lobby for an iterator version of > > os.listdir? (Perhaps listdir would not be the best name. :) > > > > There is one at > > > > http://wxidle.sourceforge.net/projects/xlistdir/ > > > > but I think it ought to be in the standard library. Moreover, if we > > had such a thing, shouldn't os.walk use it instead of lists? > > I'm not sure I see the advantage of having it as an iterator; I doubt > that there is ever not enough memory to hold the contents of a single > directory. Do you have a compelling use case?
I don't know how compelling it is, but the dirread Plan 9 call to get a directory listing (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/magic/man2html/2/dirread) returns only a subset of the entries in the directory so it effectively acts as an iterator. If it's listing a network shared file system an iterator version of listdir could result in less network traffic depending on what entry you were looking for. I don't know if NFS is the same but I think in general it would be a win for network file systems in terms of efficiency. John _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
