Quicker to os.walk or glob?

Question

I\'m messing around with file lookups in python on a large hard disk. I\'ve been looking at os.walk and glob. I usually use os.walk as I find it much neater and seems to b

Answer 1

I made a research on a small cache of web pages in 1000 dirs. The task was to count a total number of files in dirs. The output is:

os.listdir: 0.7268s, 1326786 files found
os.walk: 3.6592s, 1326787 files found
glob.glob: 2.0133s, 1326786 files found

As you see, os.listdir is quickest of three. And glog.glob is still quicker than os.walk for this task.

The source:

import os, time, glob

n, t = 0, time.time()
for i in range(1000):
    n += len(os.listdir("./%d" % i))
t = time.time() - t
print "os.listdir: %.4fs, %d files found" % (t, n)

n, t = 0, time.time()
for root, dirs, files in os.walk("./"):
    for file in files:
        n += 1
t = time.time() - t
print "os.walk: %.4fs, %d files found" % (t, n)

n, t = 0, time.time()
for i in range(1000):
    n += len(glob.glob("./%d/*" % i))
t = time.time() - t
print "glob.glob: %.4fs, %d files found" % (t, n)