From: "ara.t.howard" <ara.t.howard@...>
Date: 2007-10-08T23:27:46+09:00
Subject: Re: [ANN] Find


On Oct 7, 2007, at 6:41 AM, Bertram Scharpf wrote:

> Hi,
>
> the Ruby built-in Find module lacks a lot of features the
> GNU find tools has. I wrote a new one (~170 lines).
>
>   <http://www.bertram-scharpf.de/tmp/find.rb>
>
> Maybe somebody likes it.
>

this is one of the very smallest directories i am working with:

[cfadmin@yacht cfadmin]$ find /mnt/yacht0/data/night_files/|wc -l
   69287


[cfadmin@yacht cfadmin]$ ruby a.rb
       user     system      total        real
bertram.scharpf.find  2.140000   1.230000   3.370000 (  7.602333)
alib.util.find  1.360000   0.440000   1.800000 (  1.812519)


[cfadmin@yacht cfadmin]$ cat a.rb
require 'benchmark'
require 'alib'
require 'bertram.scharpf.find.rb'

top = '/mnt/yacht0/data/night_files/'

Benchmark.bm do |b|
   b.report('bertram.scharpf.find'){ Find.open(top){|x|} }
   b.report('alib.util.find'){ alib.util.find(top){|x|} }
end


also there is alib.util.find2 which yields the stat together with the  
path, preventing and extra stat on the pathname.  in practice doing  
something like

   def method_missing m, *a, &b
     stat.send m, *a, &b
   end

means you have to use a ton of code since it's possible that

   f.size  ### no error
   f.mtime ### ENOENT

btw mine

   http://codeforpeople.com/lib/ruby/alib/alib-0.5.0/lib/alib-0.5.0/ 
find2.rb

isn't a spectacular implementation, it is based on Motoyuki  
Kasahara's 2001 lib, which used to be on the raa, called find2 - but  
it's reasonably fast, does depth and breath, caches stats, and  
handles files evaporation from the filesystem or not being accessible  
due to permissions errors.

i think all these libraries prove that a new find mechanism needs to  
be incorporated into the stdlib!  we should take the best features  
from all the various libs and propose a new library that is backward  
compatible with the built-in find.


kind regards.

a @ http://codeforpeople.com/
--
it is not enough to be compassionate.  you must act.
h.h. the 14th dalai lama