in reply to Re: perlbug: seekdir/readdir broken on win32 on 5.008009, 5.012002, 5.014001
in thread perlbug: seekdir/readdir broken on win32 on 5.008009, 5.012002, 5.014001

Caveats about a POSIX system call aren't very relevant on a Windows system. As far as I know, Windows doesn't even have an equivalent to seekdir. If I remember correct, Perl emulates seekdir on Windows by caching previously seen entries.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^3: perlbug: seekdir/readdir broken on win32 on 5.008009, 5.012002, 5.014001
by Marshall (Canon) on Nov 27, 2011 at 20:54 UTC
    I am curious about this function (seekdir).
    It just sounds like a "solution in search of a problem"?

    I do most of my programming on Windows, but some on *nix. But even so, how many directory entries would one need in order for this type of a function to be "worthwhile" in terms of performance or memory? 1K? 10K? 50K? My mind boggles at directories of such sizes.

      You can bet graphical file explorers make use of it

      And you can bet they have been using it since 64kb of storage was plenty (or whatever the saying is)

        A graphical explorer wouldn't use this. Not now, not in the days of text-based windowing systems. They need to load the entire directory into memory in order to sort the file names.