[boost] [filesystem] size() on directory?

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-02-02 11:32:45

How should size( "foo" ) behave if "foo" is a directory?

1) Throw. The function should be renamed file_size().

2) Return 0. Directories don't strictly speaking have a size.

3) Return the number of entries in the directory. Directories are really 
just containers; so of course they have a size.

(1) and (3) seem most attractive to me; (2) seems useless for directories, 
and probably misleading.

The problem with (3) is that for many (most?) operating systems the 
implementation would have to iterate over the directory to get a count, and 
this difference in complexity compared to getting the size of a file (which 
is usually constant complexity) could be pretty surprising.

I'm inclined to go with (1), naming the function "file_size", and then add 
a function later to get the number of entries in a directory. But only if 
there is enough demand. I don't want to clutter up the library with a lot 
of seldom used functions that can be trivially written as user code.

Thoughts?

--Beman