[Tutor] Efficient way to join files

["Héctor Villafuerte D."]

Jeff Shannon wrote:

> Bob Gailer wrote:
>
>> On Windows? os.popen("copy sourcefile1 + sourcefile2 + ... 
>> destinationfile").read()
>
>
> I think that it would be a bit of a stretch to call this "more 
> efficient", at least if one thinks at all about the implementation of 
> this code.  (Maybe this just depends on one's definition of 
> "efficiency"...)
>
> You are proposing, here, to get the OS to read all the files and 
> append them to another (new) file, and then read in the new file. 
> That's, at a minimum, an extra hard drive read and hard drive write 
> for each of those files.  Using fileinput, or otherwise looping 
> through a list of files, doesn't do that.  This solution may take 
> fewer lines of code, but LoC count isn't necessarily related to real 
> efficiency in any meaningful way.
>
> I would also say that it's more clear to state, in code, "take this 
> list of files and process them one at a time, with this procedure..." 
> than to state "Get someone else to collect all of these files and copy 
> them into a new one, and then take that new file and do this..."
>
> It is simplest to write a procedure that pretends to be dealing with 
> only a single file, to be sure.  However, I think that the correct 
> abstraction is to have a function that is passed a single file, and 
> that deals with multiple files by getting them passed to it in 
> sequence, rather than to write something that handles multiple files 
> by squeezing them all together into an undifferentiated mass.


I was reading that there is a Python Profiler! I'll take a look at it 
and post which method resulted "more efficient".
This language is really nice! Pardon my excitement, but before Python I 
only knew C/C++, assembler for PIC's and VB (which I
didn't like) This is my second week with python and I have a strong 
feeling that this relationship will be a long one ;)