From: Ed Sinjiashvili <edsin@...>
Date: 2001-09-19T16:17:47+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:21378] Path walking on windows

Hi,

I've created a little script that recurses through directories and yields
all files to block. Here it is

class Dir
  def walk (prefix = nil, &walker)
    e = self.entries
    e.delete "."; e.delete ".."

    if prefix
      e.collect! {|x| File.join(prefix, x) }
    end
       
    if block_given?
      e.each {|x| 
	if File.directory? x then
	  Dir.new(x).walk x, &walker
	end
	yield x
      }
    end

    nil
  end
end

Dir.new(".").walk {|p| puts p}

But when I tried to run it on Win98 I was amazed how slow it is. I
began to browse the list archive to find a way to optimize the script 
(remembering how hash script was optimized) and found out that I
actually could use find.rb from standard library. 

require "find"
Find.find(".") {|p| puts p}

I tried it - but it was even slower than my version. Well, I decided
to give python a try.

import os

def visitor (arg, dirname, files):
    for i in range(0, len(files)):
        if not os.path.isdir(files[i]):
            print (dirname + "\\" + files[i])

os.path.walk (".", visitor, None)

Python script was magnitude times faster. Some figures (made with
simple bat file - don't know how to measure on win)

Dir.walk script - 40 sec
Find.find script - 45 sec
python script - 5 sec

I also tried all three scripts on Linux machine and ruby versions
worked just fine - they were faster than python one. All three scripts
ran less than 2 sec. I presume that this discrepancy is due to
reiserfs vs fat32 issues. The question is why ruby scripts are losing
so much against python on windoze? I'd be happy to hear any comments
from you. BTW, I've tested ruby-1.6.2 on win98, ruby-1.6.2 on Mandrake
7 and python 2.1 on both win98 and mandrake.

--
Ed Sinjiashvili