The Old New Thing

Why is breadth-first searching better for file system tree walking?

February 3, 2005 Feb 3, 2005 02/3/05

Raymond Chen

Earlier, Eric Lippert discussed one scenario where breadth-first searching is better than depth-first searching. Today, I'll tell you about another. If you go back to the old MS-DOS file enumeration functions, you'll find that there is a "Find first file" function and a "Find next file" function, but no "Find close" function. That's because...