Re: [Boost-users] [filesystem]Sorting based on equivalence information?

From: Paul Giaccone (paulg_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-14 13:12:43

Rush Manbert wrote:

>I have written a class around the glob_iterator class that W. Richard 
>Johnson put into the file vault last year. My class finds all the paths 
>and/or files matching a multi-level wildcard pattern. (i.e. the matching 
>expressions may appear in more than one place, such as 
>"/Users/*/MySource/??foo/*.cpp")
>
>I need to detect loops caused by links between directories, and I also 
>want to detect multiple paths to the same file, and only keep one of 
>them. The only method that I have come up with so far is to keep the 
>paths that I have found in a collection and test each new path against 
>all of them by calling equivalent() once for each collection member. 
>Needless to say, this is a little slow when the number of files or 
>directories becomes large. It could be faster if I only tested symlinks, 
>but I think that the existence of hard links forces me to test everything.
>
>My first question: Can anyone suggest a better method of achieving the 
>duplicates detection?
>  
>
Maybe you could use the graph library to build a graph of your directory 
structure and then work with that to find duplicate paths, loops, etc.  
I know next to nothing about the library, but this sounds like a 
graph-theoretic problem to me.

Paul