Deep Space (was: The Directory Walker revisited)

[Robert Brenstein]

>On Monday, Sep 8, 2003, at 23:18 Australia/Brisbane, David Vaughan 
><dvk at dvkconsult.com.au> wrote:
>>
>>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)
>snip
>>
>>The alternative might be some trigger into circularity, which is 
>>what happened with permissions.
>
>Found it folks!
>
>On OS X systems the folder //Network contains a reference to the 
>local computer, which is where you started, so round you go again.
>
>I made a specific adjustment at the beginning of the handler, thus:
>
>    function walkDir dirPath
>      if dirPath contains "//Network" then
>        return empty
>      end if
>  -- etc as before
>
>Running this worked across the entire root volume, returning over 
>230,000 files in a 24MB list (maxDepth 18 as expected), no problems.
>
>The same circularity will equally affect an iterative routine, not 
>only a recursive approach, so whatever you do you need to protect 
>against the specific problem or simply not allow a user to walk from 
>root. The point of this exercise was to confirm that stack size did 
>not limit a recursive approach.
>
>Note also WA's apparent problem with an X11 sub-folder, although 
>aliases did not appear to have added any circularity in my testing. 
>Any routine should also be tested specifically on a Linux or Windows 
>platform if it will be deployed there. The testing code comprises 
>displaying the current path every time you hit a new maxDepth.
>
>regards
>David

Hmm, actually, when one walks directories, shouldn't one walk only 
the true directories and treat aliases as files (which they are)?

Robert