Test for an empty directory that could be very large if it is not empty?

[Roy Smith]

In article <c4gjqvF8cmiU1 at mid.individual.net>,
 Gregory Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

> Virgil Stokes wrote:
> > How can I 
> > determine if the directory is empty WITHOUT the generation of a list of 
> > the file names
> 
> Which platform?
> 
> On Windows, I have no idea.
> 
> On Unix you can't really do this properly without access
> to opendir() and readdir(), which Python doesn't currently
> wrap.
> 
> Will the empty directories be newly created, or could they
> be ones that *used* to contain 200000 files that have since
> been deleted?
> 
> If they're new or nearly new, you could probably tell from
> looking at the size reported by stat() on the directory.
> The difference between a fresh empty directory and one with
> 200000 files in it should be fairly obvious.
> 
> A viable strategy might be: If the directory is very large,
> assume it's not empty. If it's smallish, list its contents
> to find out for sure.

I wonder if glob.iglob('*') might help here?