Re: Can't interrupt directory_files_internal run from timer-event-handler

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: "Richard M. Stallman" <address@hidden>
> CC: address@hidden, address@hidden
> Date: Sun, 07 Aug 2005 13:15:29 -0400
> 
>     There's no need to run any program just to know if a directory is
>     empty.  Emacs has primitives which will tell that directly (e.g.,
>     file-attributes) and do that faster.
> 
> How do you determine that from file-attributes?  It is not obvious.

A combination of file-attributes (looking at the number of links) and
directory-files should do that, I think.

> You might try to do it from the number of hard links to the directory,
> which will normally be 2 for an empty directory, since users normally
> can't create alternate names for a directory.  But isn't it possible
> for root to create them?

I'm not an expert on this, but I think it's impossible to create such
alternate names, since GNU Find uses this fact to detect directories
with no subdirectories.