Is there a better way of listing Windows shares other than us ing "os.listdir"

[Doran_Dermot at emc.com]

Hi David,

Thanks for the bit of code on finding shares!  I'd been using something a
bit different (win32com.client stuff) but your code looks better. 

I've found that "win32file.FindFilesIterator" (suggested to me by another
person on this mailing list) allows the gui to remain responsive. Using the
same code to execute the "os.listdir" hangs the gui!

I've been using the wx.PostEvent and Python threading objects to implement
multi-threading. Works very well!  The wxPython demo illustrates the use of
wx.PostEvent and Python multi-threading extremely well.

Thanks again for your help!

Dermot.

-----Original Message-----
From: python-list-bounces+doran_dermot=emc.com at python.org
[mailto:python-list-bounces+doran_dermot=emc.com at python.org] On Behalf Of
David Bolen
Sent: 30 December 2004 17:39
To: python-list at python.org
Subject: Re: Is there a better way of listing Windows shares other than
using "os.listdir"

Doran_Dermot at emc.com writes:

> I'm currently using "os.listdir" to obtain the contents of some slow
Windows
> shares.  I think I've seen another way of doing this using the win32
library
> but I can't find the example anymore.

Do you want the list of files on the shares or the list of shares
itself?  If the files, you can use something like FindFiles, but I
don't expect it to be that much faster just to obtain directory names
(likely the overhead is on the network).

If you just want a list of shares, you could use NetUseEnum, which
should be pretty speedy.

(FindFiles is wrapped by win32api, and NetUseEnum by win32net, both parts
 of the pywin32 package)

Here's a short example of displaying equivalent output to the "net
use" command:

          - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
import win32net

status = {0 : 'Ok',
          1 : 'Paused',
          2 : 'Disconnected',
          3 : 'Network Error',
          4 : 'Connected',
          5 : 'Reconnected'}

resume = 0
while 1:
    (results, total, resume) = win32net.NetUseEnum(None, 1, resume)
    for use in results:
        print '%-15s %-5s %s' % (status.get(use['status'], 'Unknown'),
                                 use['local'],
                                 use['remote'])
    if not resume:
        break
          - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Details on the the arguments to NetUseEnum can be found in MSDN (with
any pywin32 specifics in the pywin32 documentation).

> My main problem with using "os.listdir" is that it hangs my gui
application.
> The tread running the "os.listdir" appears to block all other threads when
> it calls this function.

Yes, for a GUI you need to keep your main GUI thread always responsive
(e.g., don't do any blocking operations).

There are a number of alternatives to handling a long processing task
in a GUI application, dependent on both the operation and toolkit in
use.  For wxPython, http://wiki.wxpython.org/index.cgi/LongRunningTasks
covers several of the options (and the theory behind them is generally
portable to other toolkits although implementation will change).

-- David
-- 
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