a program to delete duplicate files

[Patrick Useldinger]

John Machin wrote:

> Test:
> !for k in range(1000):
> !    open('foo' + str(k), 'w')

I ran that and watched it open 2 million files and going strong ... 
until I figured that files are closed by Python immediately because 
there's no reference to them ;-)

Here's my code:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
print 'max number of file handles today is',
n = 0
h = []
try:
     while True:
         filename = 'mfh' + str(n)
         h.append((file(filename,'w'),filename))
         n = n + 1
except:
     print n
     for handle, filename in h:
         handle.close()
         os.remove(filename)

On Slackware 10.1, this yields 1021.
On WinXPSP2, this yields 509.

-pu