[Python-ideas] PEP471 - (os.scandir())

[Erik]

PEP471 introduces a faster way of doing low-level directory traversal 
which is then used to implement and speed up the higher-level API 
os.walk() - which for me at least is the "go to API" for most directory 
scanning code I write.

However, when using os.walk() the first thing that one tends to do with 
the results is to analyse them in some way (look at file sizes, 
datestamps and other things that stat() returns) which is exactly the 
information that os.scandir() is caching and speeding up but which is 
then thrown away in order to emulate os.walk()'s original name-based API 
(well, name and type as the directory/file distinction is also there).

So, I'd like to suggest an os.walk()-like API that returns the 
os.scandir() DirEntry structures rather than names (*). I have my own 
local version that's just a copy of os.walk() that appends "entry" 
rather than "entry.name" to the returned lists, but that's a nasty way 
of achieving this.

How to do it -

os.walk() "direntries=True" keyword?
os.walkentries() function?
Something else better than those?

Regards, E.

(*) I have studied the PEP, followed a lot of the references and looked 
at the 3.5.0 implementation. I can't see that I've missed such a thing 
already existing, but it's possible. If so, perhaps this is instead a 
request to make that thing more obvious somehow!