🚀 go-pugleaf

On 2 Aug 2004 09:14:24 -0700, Andrue Cope [TeamB] 
   <no.spam@spammy.com> wrote:

> Saulo I. Regis wrote:
> 
>> I was not aware of that!
> 
> Every call to FindFirstFile() creates a directory pointer (my name for
> it) and this can be an expensive resource to maintain. Win32 at least
> can probably handle a lot of open searches but if you're searching a
> network volume you're at the mercy of the remote server.

Particularly since Unix servers (at least, I don't know about Windows
ones) can have links to other directories, and it is possible to get
circular links (A -> B -> C -> A) which will tend to blow up a recursive
search unless you pass in a 'depth' parameter to tell how deep the
recursion has gone.  If you keep them in a list then at least you won't
blow the stack, and you can keep track of how big it gets and fail
gracefully.

It seems that the Win2k/XP search uses some kind of multiple threads,
but only a limited number.  Presumably this works faster in some
situations (I imagine it would when accessing network or slow drives),
but at a bigger cost of complexity...

Chris C