Amount of files on a drive?

[G. Willoughby]

Yep it was trimmed down code and yes i am using a global variable!  :)  I
thought of explaining this when i first posted but i was sure everyone would
assume it was a global.  he he...

G. Willoughby

"Robin Munn" <rmunn at pobox.com> wrote in message
news:slrna65a5i.1m1.rmunn at rmunn.dyndns.org...
> On 6 Feb 2002 04:57:54 GMT, Philip Swartzleonard <starx at pacbell.net>
wrote:
> >G. Willoughby || Tue 05 Feb 2002 07:56:57a:
> >
> >> i am using this at the minute:
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> >> import win32api
> >> import string
> >> import os
> >>
> >> def countFiles(arg, dir, files):
> >>     for file in files:
> >>         count=count+1
> >>
> >> fileListings=[]
> >> driveList=string.split(win32api.GetLogicalDriveStrings(),'\0')[:-1]
> >>
> >> for drive in driveList:
> >>     os.path.walk(drive, countFiles, 0)
> >> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> >> but its pretty slow any other suggestion how i could speed it up??
> >
> >Well, first determine how long it actually takes (time it), and see how
it
> >compares to say, selecting everything on the drive and hitting properties
> >in the context menu to get a count (i.e. see how good windows itself is
at
> >it). It took my 800mhz athlon about 35 seconds to tell me that i have
6.15
> >gigs in 101,064 files in 3,930 folders on my C drive. Counting on that
> >scale can get slow.
>
> Also, the bottleneck here is going to be the drive's access time, not
> the processor speed. The access time is usually measured in milliseconds
> and is the average time for the drive's read/write head to move from one
> location to another on the disk surface. This operation is sometimes
> called a "seek". Since the drive has to perform at least one seek for
> every file, and usually more, the total time spent waiting for the hard
> drive far outweighs the time spent by the processor.
>
> On the other hand, I do see one thing you could do to improve your code.
> Chage the countFiles() function thus:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> def countFiles(arg, dir, files):
>     count = count + len(files)
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Also, I presume you're using a global variable to hold your count,
> unlike the trimmed-down example code you showed us. In the code you
> showed us above, the count variable would be a variable local to
> countFiles() and would not hold its value across separate invocations of
> countFiles(). Instead, you would do:
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> count = 0
>
> def countFiles(arg, dir, files):
>     global count
>     count = count + len(files)
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The "global count" statement inside countFiles() specifies that from
> here on, the name count will refer not to a variable local to
> countFiles() but instead to the global variable of that name.
>
> Gee, this is reminding me of that student blooper (probably an urban
> legend) that went, "The Iliad was not written by Homer, but by another
> man of that name." :)
>
> --
> Robin Munn
> rmunn at pobox.com