At 12:48 PM 2/3/2004, Powell, Gary wrote:

Beman wrote:

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. ------------------------------------------------- Gary Replies: #1, while an OS can implement directories as a file of information, I think its conceptually wrong for this function to ask for its "size". When iterating through a file system you should first guarantee that the file name is a file and not that of a sub directory.

The 4th answer would be to return the total size of all the files within the directory. But I think that's also conceptually confusing as well.

Agreed. (1) is the behavior in the preliminary version that is now in CVS. --Beman