Processing files in a directory tree

Question

I'm new to Scala, and would appreciate any notes about a better approach, correctness, or style.

/**
 * Call proc(f) for each file in the directory tree rooted at dir.
 * 
 * proc will not be called for directories, just for files.
 */
def traverse(dir: File, proc: File => Unit): Unit = {
    dir.listFiles foreach { (f) => {
            if(f.isDirectory) {
                traverse(f, proc)
            } else {
                proc(f)
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

Your code is fine. Nevertheless, removing unnecessary braces can increase readability:

def traverse(dir: File, proc: File => Unit): Unit =
  dir.listFiles foreach { f => if (f.isDirectory) traverse(f, proc) else proc(f) }

Answer 2

I prefer something like this:

def traverse(root: File): Iterator[File] =
  if (root.isDirectory)
    root.listFiles.iterator.map(traverse).fold(Seq(root).iterator)(_ ++ _)
  else
    Seq(root).iterator

You can use that iterator with a foreach (as you are doing), but you get a lot more of flexibility, you can do map, filter, and all the usual Scala awesomeness very easily. For example, this is what you were doing

  def whatever(root:File, proc:File => Unit) = traverse(root) foreach proc

There may be more efficient (@tailrec maybe), lazy or better options. I'd be interested in seeing them, this was just the most immediate solution I could think of to put an example.

PD: this doesn't filter the files that are directories, you can impose that constraint with something of the form:

def traverse(root: File): Iterator[File] =
  if (root.isDirectory)
    root.listFiles.iterator map traverse reduce (_ ++ _)
  else
    Seq(root).iterator

But I'd suggest not to do that.

PD: perhaps the signature should be something like:

def toTraversable(root:File): Traversable[File]

Maybe its in the standard Scala API already...