From: Kyle Schmitt <kyleaschmitt@...>
Date: 2008-01-12T00:19:32+09:00
Subject: Counting the files in a directory....

I'm writing some scripts to help manage a mail scanner used at my
work.  Being a mail scanner, it's got huuuuUUUge quarantine
directories.

Now, I know I can do something along the lines of:

Dir.open("/foo").collect.length-2   #if you're wondering, the -2 is to
ignore . and ..

to get a count of what's in a directory, but the problem there is,
it's rather slow when you run that in a directory with a few thousand
files on a server under a severe (4.5>average_load>2) load.

After perusing the Dir, Find and Stat classes, I haven't seen a better way.
I thought that perhaps there was some sort of system call, at least in
Real OSes™ (Linux, *BSD, Unix, etc), that would return the number of
files inside of a directory.  Something that would hopefully return in
a 1/4th or 1/8th a second, rather than in 4 or 8 (or 20...) seconds.

Any clues?

Thanks,
         Kyle