limits to opendir and readdir

[rotis23]

Hi All,

I've got a program that has to trawl through a directory with many (I MEAN many) files - it's a maildir of about 6GB on an NFS mount on a solaris 8 box.

What are the limits with opendir and readdir in this context? I'm trawling thorugh it deleting files older than a couple of weeks.

The process takes a large amount of time and using top it seems to be in a sleep state - is it just reading the directory?

Any advice? Is this better written in C?

Thanks for your help, rotis23

 

[PaulTEG]

opendir, shouldn't be a limit
readdir, only limited by available memory one would have thought

Have you tried printing a debug log to see how asleep it actually is?

--Paul

It's important in life to always strike a happy medium, so if you see someone with a crystal ball, and a smile on their face ...

 

[rotis23]

Thanks Paul - it's working, just taking a long time.

 

[PaulTEG]

There may be better options using 'globbing'
File::Find might also be an option

Dunno if it'll speed it up though, it's proabably still based on the type of building blocks, but it might be worth a gander at any rate

G'Luck
--Paul

It's important in life to always strike a happy medium, so if you see someone with a crystal ball, and a smile on their face ...

 

[ishnid]

If you're using readdir in scalar context, available memory shouldn't be an issue. In list context, it'll return a list of all the files in the directory, which (if there are lots of files), will eat up a huge amount of memory - here's an example of that (code untested):

unlink for grep { -M > 14 } readdir DIR;

In scalar context, readdir just returns the next file in the directory, so there should only be one filename in memory at a time, for example:

while (my $file = readdir DIR) {
   unlink $file if -M $file > 14;
}