Find a file in a large directory quickly

I have a directory with thousands of files matching a pattern, and all I need is the name of any one of them. If I call dir(pattern), it takes a long time. I'd appreciate any ideas on speeding it up.

Thank you,

Naum

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

About the only possibility that might be faster would be to dir() the entire directory and do the pattern matching yourself. You would get all of the names together, of all of the files.

My expectation would be that doing that would be slower than what you already have, as the pattern matching that exists already is almost certainly more efficient than what you would implement in MATLAB.

[Naum Derzhi]

Thank you for your answer.

Yes, this is correct. I timed dir with and without pattern, and there is no discernible difference. I was hoping to find some flags/parameters which would force it to stop once one match is found. Like the 'once' argument in some find... functions. Or find some other function which would do the same. So far, no luck.

[Walter Roberson]

You might be able to create some mex code for the task. See for example http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Accessing-Directories.html#Accessing-Directories