Is there a better way of listing Windows shares other than using "os.listdir"

[Doran_...@emc.com]

Hi All,

I'm currently using "os.listdir" to obtain the contents of some slow Windows
shares. I think I've seen another way of doing this using the win32 library
but I can't find the example anymore.

My main problem with using "os.listdir" is that it hangs my gui application.
The tread running the "os.listdir" appears to block all other threads when
it calls this function.

Any ideas, comments or suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

Dermot.

[David Bolen]

Doran_...@emc.com writes:

> I'm currently using "os.listdir" to obtain the contents of some slow Windows
> shares. I think I've seen another way of doing this using the win32 library
> but I can't find the example anymore.

Do you want the list of files on the shares or the list of shares
itself? If the files, you can use something like FindFiles, but I
don't expect it to be that much faster just to obtain directory names
(likely the overhead is on the network).

If you just want a list of shares, you could use NetUseEnum, which
should be pretty speedy.

(FindFiles is wrapped by win32api, and NetUseEnum by win32net, both parts
of the pywin32 package)

Here's a short example of displaying equivalent output to the "net
use" command:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
import win32net

status = {0 : 'Ok',
1 : 'Paused',
2 : 'Disconnected',
3 : 'Network Error',
4 : 'Connected',
5 : 'Reconnected'}

resume = 0
while 1:
(results, total, resume) = win32net.NetUseEnum(None, 1, resume)
for use in results:
print '%-15s %-5s %s' % (status.get(use['status'], 'Unknown'),
use['local'],
use['remote'])
if not resume:
break
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Details on the the arguments to NetUseEnum can be found in MSDN (with
any pywin32 specifics in the pywin32 documentation).

> My main problem with using "os.listdir" is that it hangs my gui application.
> The tread running the "os.listdir" appears to block all other threads when
> it calls this function.

Yes, for a GUI you need to keep your main GUI thread always responsive
(e.g., don't do any blocking operations).

There are a number of alternatives to handling a long processing task
in a GUI application, dependent on both the operation and toolkit in
use. For wxPython, http://wiki.wxpython.org/index.cgi/LongRunningTasks
covers several of the options (and the theory behind them is generally
portable to other toolkits although implementation will change).

-- David