Re: Efficient processing of large directory

[Elliott]

Thank you all for your advice. My reading of your answers is that two approaches would help:

• Reorganise into subdirectories as I originally thought
• Use while instead of foreach

I have already converted to using while but I haven't had the chance to check for improvement yet. Can I have opinions on whether using both solutions together is worthwhile (pun not intended!)?

BTW, the file names are email addresses (opt-in list, no spam here I promise!!) with \W characters removed. I was planning to pick 2nd and 4th chars to name the subdirectories in order to avoid grubbiness. Any thoughts on that?

[tilly]

Switch to a dbm like DB_File instead of lots of small files. Particularly if you use a BTree, you will get much better organized usage of disk.

But do keep text backups in case an upgrade breaks DB_File.