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scandir, a better directory iterator

UPDATE: I've written a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) that proposes including scandir() in the standard library. Please read PEP 471 for details.

scandir is a module which provides a generator version of os.listdir() that also exposes the extra file information the operating system returns when you iterate a directory. scandir also provides a much faster version of os.walk(), because it can use the extra file information exposed by the scandir() function.

scandir is intended to work on Python 2.6+ and Python 3.2+ (and it has been tested on those versions).

Note that this module is currently beta software -- working and used to some extent, and more than a proof-of-concept, but not battle-tested or extremely widely used. It's my hope that scandir will be included in Python 3.5 as os.scandir().

Background

Python's built-in os.walk() is significantly slower than it needs to be, because -- in addition to calling listdir() on each directory -- it calls stat() on each file to determine whether the filename is a directory or not. But both FindFirstFile / FindNextFile on Windows and readdir on Linux/OS X already tell you whether the files returned are directories or not, so no further stat system calls are needed. In short, you can reduce the number of system calls from about 2N to N, where N is the total number of files and directories in the tree.

In practice, removing all those extra system calls makes ``os.walk()`` about 7-20 times as fast on Windows, and about 4-5 times as fast on Linux and Mac OS X. So we're not talking about micro-optimizations. See more benchmarks in the "Benchmarks" section below.

Somewhat relatedly, many people have also asked for a version of os.listdir() that yields filenames as it iterates instead of returning them as one big list. This improves memory efficiency for iterating very large directories.

So as well as a faster walk(), scandir adds a new scandir() function. They're pretty easy to use, but see "The API" below for the full docs.

Why you should care

I'd love for these incremental (but significant!) improvements to be added to the Python standard library. This scandir module was released to help test the concept and get it in shape for inclusion in the standard os module.

There are various third-party "path" and "walk directory" libraries available, but Python's os module isn't going away anytime soon. So we might as well speed it up and add small improvements where possible.

So I'd love it if you could help test scandir, report bugs, suggest improvements, or comment on the API.

Benchmarks

Below are results showing how many times as fast scandir.walk() is than os.walk() on various systems, found by running benchmark.py with no arguments as well as with the -s argument (which totals the directory size):

System version          Python version  Speed ratio    With -s
--------------------------------------------------------------
Windows 7 64-bit        2.7.5 64-bit    7.5            14.2
Windows 7 64-bit SSD    2.7.6 64-bit    10.0           18.5
Windows 7 64-bit NFS    2.7.6 64-bit    23.2           46.4
Windows 7 64-bit        3.4.1 64-bit    TODO

CentOS 6.5 64-bit       2.7.6 64-bit    5.5            2.3
Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit     2.7.3 32-bit    4.3            2.2

Mac OS X 10.9.3         2.7.5 64-bit    5.3            2.1

All of the above tests were done using the version of scandir with the fast C scandir_helper() function.

Note that the gains are less than the above on smaller directories and greater on larger directories. This is why benchmark.py creates a test directory tree with a standardized size.

Another quick benchmark I've done (on Windows 7 64-bit) is running Eli Bendersky's pss source code searching tool across a fairly large code tree (4938 files, 598 dirs, 200 MB). Using pss out of the box with os.walk() on a not-found string takes 0.91 seconds. But after monkey-patching in scandir.walk() it takes only 0.34 seconds -- 2.7 times as fast.

The API

walk()

The API for scandir.walk() is exactly the same as os.walk(), so just read the Python docs.

scandir()

The scandir() function is the scandir module's main workhorse. It's defined as follows:

scandir(path='.') -> generator of DirEntry objects

Like listdir, scandir calls the operating system's directory iteration system calls to get the names of the files in the given path, but it's different from listdir in two ways:

  • Instead of returning bare filename strings, it returns lightweight DirEntry objects that hold the filename string and provide simple methods that allow access to the additional data the operating system may have returned.
  • It returns a generator instead of a list, so that scandir acts as a true iterator instead of returning the full list immediately.

scandir() yields a DirEntry object for each file and sub-directory in path. Just like listdir, the '.' and '..' pseudo-directories are skipped, and the entries are yielded in system-dependent order. Each DirEntry object has the following attributes and methods:

  • name: the entry's filename, relative to the scandir path argument (corresponds to the return values of os.listdir)
  • path: the entry's full path name (not necessarily an absolute path) -- the equivalent of os.path.join(scandir_path, entry.name)
  • is_dir(*, follow_symlinks=True): similar to pathlib.Path.is_dir(), but the return value is cached on the DirEntry object; doesn't require a system call in most cases; don't follow symbolic links if follow_symlinks is False
  • is_file(*, follow_symlinks=True): similar to pathlib.Path.is_file(), but the return value is cached on the DirEntry object; doesn't require a system call in most cases; don't follow symbolic links if follow_symlinks is False
  • is_symlink(): similar to pathlib.Path.is_symlink(), but the return value is cached on the DirEntry object; doesn't require a system call in most cases
  • stat(*, follow_symlinks=True): like os.stat(), but the return value is cached on the DirEntry object; does not require a system call on Windows (except for symlinks); don't follow symbolic links (like os.lstat()) if follow_symlinks is False

Here's a very simple example of scandir() showing use of the DirEntry.name attribute and the DirEntry.is_dir() method:

def subdirs(path):
    """Yield directory names not starting with '.' under given path."""
    for entry in os.scandir(path):
        if not entry.name.startswith('.') and entry.is_dir():
            yield entry.name

This subdirs() function will be significantly faster with scandir than os.listdir() and os.path.isdir() on both Windows and POSIX systems, especially on medium-sized or large directories.

See PEP 471 for more details on caching and error handling.

Further reading

To-do

  • Finish the C extension version (_scandir.c)
  • Get PEP 471 accepted and scandir() included in the Python 3.5 standard library! :-)

Flames, comments, bug reports

Please send flames, comments, and questions about scandir to Ben Hoyt:

http://benhoyt.com/

File bug reports or feature requests at the GitHub project page:

https://github.com/benhoyt/scandir