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Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory

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On 17/12/2012 15:41, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 18, 2012 at 2:28 AM, Gilles Lenfant 
> <gilles.lenfant@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> 
>> I have googled but did not find an efficient solution to my
>> problem. My customer provides a directory with a huuuuge list of
>> files (flat, potentially 100000+) and I cannot reasonably use
>> os.listdir(this_path) unless creating a big memory footprint.
>> 
>> So I'm looking for an iterator that yields the file names of a
>> directory and does not make a giant list of what's in.
> 
> Sounds like you want os.walk. But... a hundred thousand files? I
> know the Zen of Python says that flat is better than nested, but
> surely there's some kind of directory structure that would make this 
> marginally manageable?
> 
> http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/os.html#os.walk

Unfortunately all of the built-in functions (os.walk, glob.glob,
os.listdir) rely on the os.listdir functionality which produces a list
first even if (as in glob.iglob) it later iterates over it.

There are external functions to iterate over large directories in both
Windows & Linux. I *think* the OP is on *nix from his previous posts, in
which case someone else will have to produce the Linux-speak for this.
If it's Windows, you can use the FindFilesIterator in the pywin32 package.

TJG

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Thread

Iterating over files of a huge directory Gilles Lenfant <gilles.lenfant@gmail.com> - 2012-12-17 07:28 -0800
  Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2012-12-18 02:41 +1100
    Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Paul Rudin <paul.nospam@rudin.co.uk> - 2012-12-17 17:27 +0000
      Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory MRAB <python@mrabarnett.plus.com> - 2012-12-17 18:29 +0000
      Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com> - 2012-12-18 08:10 +1100
  Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Tim Golden <mail@timgolden.me.uk> - 2012-12-17 15:48 +0000
  Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin@gmail.com> - 2012-12-17 15:52 +0000
    Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Gilles Lenfant <gilles.lenfant@gmail.com> - 2012-12-17 08:06 -0800
    Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Gilles Lenfant <gilles.lenfant@gmail.com> - 2012-12-17 08:06 -0800
  Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory marduk <marduk@python.net> - 2012-12-17 10:50 -0500
  Re: Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Evan Driscoll <driscoll@cs.wisc.edu> - 2012-12-17 12:40 -0600
  Re: Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Oscar Benjamin <oscar.j.benjamin@gmail.com> - 2012-12-17 19:50 +0000
  Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Evan Driscoll <driscoll@cs.wisc.edu> - 2012-12-17 14:09 -0600
  Re: Iterating over files of a huge directory Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> - 2012-12-17 16:27 -0500

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