Re: Enhancement for file-attributes

[Juanma Barranquero <lekktu@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 3:16 AM, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> It would have made a lot of sense originally, but I'm wondering whether
> it's worth the trouble now.  In how many places would we save the
> file-chase-links all?  Are these places important?

I don't know about that, but a way to ask file-attributes for a
specific value, instead of computing them all and consing them into a
list would perhaps make sense.

I recently counted uses of (nth X (file-attributes ...)), and
variants, like (car (file-attributes ...)) and (let ((atr
(file-attributes ...))) ...), etc. Asking for the file size happens >
110 times in the sources; last modification time, > 50; all the rest,
<10 each (approx, as I counted by hand).

So a function (file-size X) doing an optimized equivalent of  (nth 7
(file-attributes (file-truename NAME))) would be useful, and cleaner
IMO.

    Juanma