Peer code review is a critical milestone step in any good development process; especially with distributed teams.  CodeCollaborator, Crucible, and Kiln are all great tools for facilitating peer code review without having to go through all the headache of gathering files, scheduling meetings, pissing off your co-workers, etc.

Check out the video.  It’s worth the 3-minutes.

Before doing so, I always make it a point to re-watch and re-read this presentation given by Joshua Bloch from Google.  Joshua does a fantastic job going over the DOs and DON’Ts of good API design.

You can also download the slides here.

What can happen, especially on a Window server, is that the operating system will attempt to load all the file information into memory, so that you can see it, and then tell it to sort all those files by date, which in turn, increases the time and memory needed by the OS to accomplish this.  If the file size/quantity is too great, the problem that caused you to want to clean up the disk space will reappear and choke Windows once more.

After going through this more than twice, I decided to write a JavaScript and execute it using the Windows Scripting Host (WSH).  The script performs very well and was able to iterate through a directory of 700,000+ files in a matter of an hour.  This was including the log statements from being enabled.  Disabling the ‘Echo’ statements may increase performance.

Here is the script:

var fso = new ActiveXObject('Scripting.FileSystemObject');
var argArray = new Array(WScript.Arguments.Named("src"), WScript.Arguments.Named("s"), ".");
var inSrcDirName = coalesceArray(argArray);

argArray = new Array(WScript.Arguments.Named("dest"), WScript.Arguments.Named("d"));
var archiveDir = coalesceArray(argArray);

argArray = new Array(WScript.Arguments.Named("year"), WScript.Arguments.Named("y"));
var beforeYear = coalesceArray(argArray);

if (archiveDir != null) {
	if (!fso.FolderExists(archiveDir)) {
		fso.CreateFolder(archiveDir);
	} else {
		fso.CreateFolder(archiveDir + "1");
	}
}

var gfldr = fso.GetFolder(inSrcDirName);

ArchiveFiles(gfldr);

function ArchiveFiles(fldr) {
	var i, bias;

	WScript.Echo("Loading all files...");
	for (files = new Enumerator(fldr.files); !files.atEnd(); files.moveNext()) {
		f = files.item();
		dt = new Date(f.DateCreated);
		bias = dt.getTimezoneOffset();

		dt.setMinutes(dt.getMinutes() - bias);

		fileYear = dt.getFullYear();
		//WScript.Echo(f.Name + ":" + fileYear);
		if (beforeYear > fileYear) {
			WScript.Echo("Moving \"" + f.Name + "\" with year " + fileYear + " to " + archiveDir);
			f.Move(archiveDir+"\\" + f.Name)
		} else {
			WScript.Echo("Skipping \"" + f.Name + "\" with year " + fileYear);
		}
	}
	WScript.Echo("Done loading files.");

}

function coalesceArray(arr) {
	var i;
	for (i = 0; i < arr.length; i++) {
		if (arr[i] != null) {
			return arr[i];
		}
	}
	return null;
}

Executing the script is performed by passing a source directory, destination directory (to move the files to), and a year to mark the year that all files must be equal to or younger than to not be moved as parameters.

Example:

cscript movefiles.js /s:c:\myapp\data /d:c:\backup\archive_2006 /y:2007

This will move all files from the c:\myapp\data folder that were created before January 1, 2007 to the c:\backup\archive_2006 folder.  The script can be easily modified to use the ‘modified’ or ‘accessed’ date instead.

Hope this helps someone else as much as it helped me.