What is the fastest way to check whether a directory is empty in Python

Question

I work on a windows machine and want to check if a directory on a network path is empty.

The first thing that came to mind was calling os.listdir() and see if it has length 0.

i.e

def dir_empty(dir_path):
    return len(os.listdir(dir_path)) == 0

Because this is a network path where I do not always have good connectivity and because a folder can potentially contain thousands of files, this is a very slow solution. Is there a better one?

Answer 1

The fastest solution I found so far:

def dir_empty(dir_path):
    return not any((True for _ in os.scandir(dir_path)))

Or, as proposed in the comments below:

def dir_empty(dir_path):
    return not next(os.scandir(dir_path), None)

On the slow network I was working on this took seconds instead of minutes (minutes for the os.listdir() version). This seems to be faster, as the any statement only evaluates the first True statement.