#9266: getDirectoryContents blow its stack in a huge directory ----------------------------------------+---------------------------------- Reporter: joeyhess | Owner: Type: bug | Status: new Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: libraries/directory | Version: 7.6.2 Resolution: | Keywords: Operating System: Linux | Architecture: Type of failure: None/Unknown | Unknown/Multiple Test Case: | Difficulty: Unknown Blocking: | Blocked By: | Related Tickets: ----------------------------------------+---------------------------------- Comment (by joeyhess): Sorry, had wrong ghc version entered before. It might indeed save some memory to deepseq the accumulator as described in the blog post. I have not tried, since in my use case I want to avoid buffering the whole list in memory at all. I'm currently using a getDirectoryContents' that uses unsafeInterleaveIO. To avoid exceptions being thrown after the call has succeeded, when the return list is traversed, I made it catch and discard exceptions from Posix.readDirStream etc, so in an exceptional condition the list may not contain all items in the directory. That was ok in my use case, but I dunno if it would be acceptable for the real getDirectoryContents. It would probably be fine to just fix it to not blow the stack, and perhaps add a note to its documentation that the list of directory contents is not streamed lazily. (Although note that eg, removeDirectoryRecursive uses getDirectoryContents and so can also unexpectedly use large amounts of memory..) I do wonder if conduit has a better way to handle this. -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9266#comment:5 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler