[ftputil] Stat'ing a Whole Directory

[Dan Milstein]

FTPUtil Folk,

I've been using the lovely ftputil lib, and, basically, it's fab.

However, for my app, I need to produce detailed directory listings  
for the files on the remote server.  With the current interface, that  
means getting the list of all files (one remote call), and then  
fetching that entire list over and over in order to stat each  
individual file (a remote call for every file).

There's already a ticket for caching stat results, but what works  
better for me is to add a new call:

host.statdir(path)

(or host.lstatdir(path), if that makes more sense -- I'm not the most  
perfectly clear on how symbolic links interact with ftp).

The call returns a list of stat results, making a single remote call  
and then parsing the entire list.  This gets around the need for  
caching (which I'd prefer to avoid, because of synchronization  
issues), and has very nice performance.

I've actually patched ftputil and ftp_stat with the necessary code to  
do this.  I'd be happy to send along patches for those files, or just  
include the code in an email.

-Dan Milstein