Question

A function for returning sum of the sizes of its arguments which could be single file/directory or a list of files/directories, is given below. The code gives an error message RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded while calling a Python object however I try to test this.

How to fix this?

Thanks

suresh

#!/usr/bin/python3.1
import os

def fileSizes(f):
    if hasattr(f,'__iter__'):
        return sum(filter(fileSizes,f))
    if os.path.isfile(f):
        return os.path.getsize(f)
    elif os.path.isdir(f):
        total_size = os.path.getsize(f)
        for item in os.listdir(f):
            total_size += fileSizes(os.path.join(f, item))
        return total_size

Answer 1

The problem is in the line:

if hasattr(f,'__iter__'):
    return sum(filter(fileSizes,f))

Since f is a path, it is a string, and it has the attribute __iter__, so you loop there infinitely.