On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 10:35 AM Mateusz Krawczuk mkrawczuk@opera.com wrote:

Wouldn't it be better to go straight to Pike-devel to preserve the wisdom for broader audience?

On the odd chance that pike-devel want late night musings in Swedish, then sure. I'm going to veto anyone else doing that though, so I don't think the chances of everyone agreeing to see my badly thought thru rants are high.

Anyways, time to write something more coherent:

We need a better API for handling directory listing, especially for coupling the listings with their metadata (stat struct). At the moment this is the most compact way of listing files in a dir sorted by creation time I could come up with:

string mydir = "/tmp"; array files = get_dir(mydir); files = combine_path(mydir, files[*]); sort(files, file_stat(files[*])->ctime);

And whenever automap feels like a good idea the API probably needs to be looked at. This will also explode in your face if files have been deleted between get_dir() and file_stat().

The question is what that API should be. We have a slightly extended API available in Filesystem:

object fs = Filesystem.System("/tmp"); array files = fs->get_dir(); sort(files, fs->get_stats()->ctime);

While this is cute if the directory contents is completely static (see Filesystem.Tar), not so much otherwise.

I have some ideas of how a new API should look, basically:

1. Add a function (possibly to Filesystem) that returns both the listing and stats, so that TOCTOU error handling can be kept away from the user. 2. Add a convenience function where you can request a already sorted list based on any criteria you want. 3. bonus: more iterators

Regards,