Hello. I have a problem I ran into when I tried writing a function to use lazy IO . Specifically, I would like to be able to compare two directory trees, and I thought the best way to do this would be to compartmentalize things by writing an IO function to read in a whole directory tree (including the contents of its files) in a lazy manner, and then the code to manipulate this tree could be purely functional and non-monadic. The problem is that while reading a file in with readFile (or openFile followed by hGetContents) is lazy regarding the reading of the actual file data, it leaves the file handle open, and (at least on ghc under linux) quickly exhausts the available file handles. I guess this makes sense, since if the file wasn't opened until it was actually used, a file open error couldn't flag an exception at the appropriate time... I think this is a related question to the thread on config files and pure file reading. Certainly if there was a pure functional file read (i.e. readFileOnce), that would solve my problem. I hate to have to write monadic IO code right into the core of my code. The Haskell 98 Library Report describes the state of a file handle after hGetContents as 'semi-closed', meaning it will close as soon as it is finished with the current read. Is there any way to get the file handle into a 'semi-opened' state, in which it will be opened as soon as it starts getting read? That's what I'd really like. fwiw, here's the code I'd like to use to slurp up a directory and its contents:

slurp dirname = do isdir <- doesDirectoryExist dirname if isdir then do former_dir <- getCurrentDirectory fnames <- getDirectoryContents dirname setCurrentDirectory dirname sl <- slurp_list $ skip_hidden fnames setCurrentDirectory former_dir return $ SlurpDir dirname sl else do isfile <- doesFileExist dirname if isfile then do contents <- readFile dirname return $ SlurpFile dirname (lines contents) else return $ SlurpFile "Oops" []

slurp_list :: [FilePath] -> IO [Slurpy] slurp_list [] = return [] slurp_list (f:fs) = do s <- slurp f ss <- slurp_list fs return (s:ss)

skip_hidden :: [FilePath] -> [FilePath] skip_hidden [] = [] skip_hidden (('.':_):fps) = skip_hidden fps skip_hidden (fp:fps) = fp : skip_hidden fps

To restate my question (which I may have forgotten to ask...), is there a good way to do this? The only thing that comes to mind is to use unsafeIO, which sounds scary. (Mostly because I don't think I would really understand the consequences.) -- David Roundy http://civet.berkeley.edu/droundy/