Re: Re: Re: Efficient processing of large directory

[dragonchild]

in reply to Re: Re: Efficient processing of large directory
in thread Efficient processing of large directory

It has to do with how foreach (and for, which is an exact synonym) works. foreach will construct the entire list, then iterate through it. This can be very memory-intensive, which will slow the processing speed (due to cache misses and virtual memory issues.) A nearly exact rewrite of foreach in terms of while would look something like:

foreach my $n (<*.*>)
{
    # do stuff
}

----

my @list = <*.*>;
my $i = 0;
while ($i <= $#list)
{
    my $n = $list[$i];
    # do stuff
}
continue
{
    $i++;
}

[BUU]

Er, why on earth do you tell him to use while and then to use while to do the exact same thing the for loop had been doing previously? Your method is still going to need to build the 17,000 element list and iterate over it, it just uses a more explicit form. A rewrite which gets around this would be simply:

while(my $x = <*.*>)
{
  do_stuff($x);
}

This will only read a single file at a time and has no need to create huge lists.

[dragonchild]

Because I'm not answering the original question. I'm answering the question "What's the difference between for and while?". In that context (which was obvious from the followup question), does my post make sense?

[merlyn]

Uh, in most modern Perls, this is using File::Glob, which does in fact pull everything into memory anyway, to properly emulate the sorted list of the shell.