[erlang-questions] Best way to check if a given directory is empty (or not)?

[Steve Strong]

Yeah, if there are other processes (erlang or os) then that would be a problem :) - obviously easy to recreate the directory if it did get deleted but you would have that time when it wasn't there.

Sent from my iPhone

On 13 Mar 2012, at 08:49, Zabrane Mickael <zabrane3@REDACTED> wrote:

> I already tried the file:del_dir/1 trick.
> 
> The only downside is when this directory is really empty ... then it will be deleted.
> My app will not work anymore as the existence of the directory is mandatory.
> 
> Regards,
> Zabrane
> 
> 
> On Mar 13, 2012, at 8:41 AM, Steve Strong wrote:
> 
>> Not a good solution if other apps are using the directory, but if it's just your app you could call file:del_dir() - if it's empty, it will return ok if not you'll get an {error,eexist} error.  No idea on the performance characteristics, but suspect it's pretty good...
>> 
>> -- 
>> Steve Strong
>> @srstrong
>> 
>> Sent with Sparrow
>> 
>> On Tuesday, 13 March 2012 at 07:09, Zabrane Mickael wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi guys,
>>> 
>>> I'd like to know if there's a good and portable method to check if a directory is empty (or not)?
>>> In my case, the directory can contains huge number (more than 150K in average) of files if it is not empty.
>>> 
>>> I've tested the following working calls:
>>> a. file:list_dir/1
>>> b. filelib:wildcard/2
>>> 
>>> The problem with them is they both return a list of filenames.
>>> I'd like to avoid getting this list back to be able to check if it's empty or not.
>>> 
>>> Advices please?
>>> 
>>> Regards
>>> Zabrane
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> erlang-questions mailing list
>>> erlang-questions@REDACTED
>>> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>> 
> 
> 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20120313/1c983596/attachment.htm>