Deep Space (was: The Directory Walker revisited)

[David Vaughan]

On Monday, Sep 8, 2003, at 18:12 Australia/Brisbane, Wouter 
<wouter.abraham at pi.be> wrote:
>
> Thank you very much for answering for I see my confusion now.
> But the excellent recursive function from David Vaughn has encountered
> an other limit. It crashes Metacard/Revolution at about 20303 to 20335 
> iterations
> on my computer (tested on the complete Mac OS X volume which seems to
> have > 100000 folders, didn't go further by lack of time). Makes you 
> think about
> what is more preferable, though this is an extreme condition.
> But it's probably something for the Metacard-engine coders to solve.

Hmm. I have now encountered the same problem. As I wrote before, I had 
no difficulty with 100,000 files and directories 17 deep, but the same 
folders examined from their parent (the volume name) lead to a far 
higher depth count (should have been only 18) and did not finish after 
30 minutes. There was no crash, per se, just endless processing. The 
amount of work being done makes this a bad one to try to trace.

I am wondering if this is a problem arising from the amount of data 
(roughly estimated at 10MB considering a full path for every file) 
being returned on the stack as the function nears the top.

The alternative might be some trigger into circularity, which is what 
happened with permissions.

Perhaps it is OSX-specific. Is the same issue encountered on Windows or 
Linux please?

Seems worth some work given the code should work for virtually any 
situation.

regards
David (Vaughan)
>
> Greetings,
> WA