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> I'd slightly prefer the name iterdir_stat(), as that almost makes the (name, stat) return values explicit in the name. But that's kind of bikeshedding -- scandir() works too.
I find iterdir_stat() ugly :-)
I like the scandir name, which has some precedent with POSIX.
> That's right: if we have a separate scandir() that returns (name, stat) tuples, then a plain iterdir() is pretty much unnecessary -- callers just ignore the second stat value if they don't care about it.
Hum, wait.
scandir() cannot return (name, stat), because on POSIX, readdir() only
returns d_name and d_type (the type of the entry): to return a stat,
we would have to call stat() on each entry, which would defeat the
performance gain.
And that's the problem with scandir: it's not portable. Depending on
the OS/file system, you could very well get DT_UNKNOWN (and on Linux,
since it uses an adaptive heuristic for NFS filesystem, you could have
some entries with a resolved d_type and some others with DT_UNKNOWN,
on the same directory stream).
That's why scandir would be a rather low-level call, whose main user
would be walkdir, which only needs to know the entry time and not the
whole stat result.
Also, I don't know which information is returned by the readdir
equivalent on Windows, but if we want a consistent API, we have to
somehow map d_type and Windows's returned type to a common type, like
DT_FILE, DT_DIRECTORY, etc (which could be an enum).
The other approach would be to return a dummy stat object with only
st_mode set, but that would be kind of a hack to return a dummy stat
result with only part of the attributes set (some people will get
bitten by this).