walkdir

A cross platform Rust library for efficiently walking a directory recursively. Comes with support for following symbolic links, controlling the number of open file descriptors and efficient mechanisms for pruning the entries in the directory tree.

Dual-licensed under MIT or the UNLICENSE.

Documentation

docs.rs/walkdir

Usage

To use this crate, add walkdir as a dependency to your project's Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
walkdir = "2"

Example

The following code recursively iterates over the directory given and prints the path for each entry:

use walkdir::WalkDir;

for entry in WalkDir::new("foo") {
    let entry = entry.unwrap();
    println!("{}", entry.path().display());
}

Or, if you'd like to iterate over all entries and ignore any errors that may arise, use filter_map. (e.g., This code below will silently skip directories that the owner of the running process does not have permission to access.)

use walkdir::WalkDir;

for entry in WalkDir::new("foo").into_iter().filter_map(|e| e.ok()) {
    println!("{}", entry.path().display());
}

Example: follow symbolic links

The same code as above, except follow_links is enabled:

use walkdir::WalkDir;

for entry in WalkDir::new("foo").follow_links(true) {
    let entry = entry.unwrap();
    println!("{}", entry.path().display());
}

Example: skip hidden files and directories efficiently on unix

This uses the filter_entry iterator adapter to avoid yielding hidden files and directories efficiently:

use walkdir::{DirEntry, WalkDir};

fn is_hidden(entry: &DirEntry) -> bool {
    entry.file_name()
         .to_str()
         .map(|s| s.starts_with("."))
         .unwrap_or(false)
}

let walker = WalkDir::new("foo").into_iter();
for entry in walker.filter_entry(|e| !is_hidden(e)) {
    let entry = entry.unwrap();
    println!("{}", entry.path().display());
}

Motivation

std::fs has an unstable walk_dir implementation that needed some design work. I started off on that task, but it quickly became apparent that walking a directory recursively is quite complex and may not be a good fit for std right away.

This should at least resolve most or all of the issues reported here (and then some):

• https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/27707
• https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/23715

Performance

The short story is that performance is comparable with find and glibc's nftw on both a warm and cold file cache. In fact, I cannot observe any performance difference after running find /, walkdir / and nftw / on my local file system (SSD, ~3 million entries). More precisely, I am reasonably confident that this crate makes as few system calls and close to as few allocations as possible.

I haven't recorded any benchmarks, but here are some things you can try with a local checkout of walkdir:

# The directory you want to recursively walk:
DIR=$HOME

# If you want to observe perf on a cold file cache, run this before *each*
# command:
sudo sh -c 'echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches'

# To warm the caches
find $DIR

# Test speed of `find` on warm cache:
time find $DIR

# Compile and test speed of `walkdir` crate:
cargo build --release --example walkdir
time ./target/release/examples/walkdir $DIR

# Compile and test speed of glibc's `nftw`:
gcc -O3 -o nftw ./compare/nftw.c
time ./nftw $DIR

# For shits and giggles, test speed of Python's (2 or 3) os.walk:
time python ./compare/walk.py $DIR

On my system, the performance of walkdir, find and nftw is comparable.