ruby - get a file from directory without listing all contents

I'm using the开发者_JS百科 split linux command to split huge xml files into node-sized ones. The problem is now I have directory with hundreds of thousands of files.

I want a way to get a file from the directory (to pass to another process for import into our database) without needing to list everything in it. Is this how Dir.foreach already works? Any other ideas?

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You can use Dir.glob to find the files you need. More details here, but basically, you pass it a pattern like Dir.glob 'dir/*.rb' and get back filenames matching that pattern. I assume it's done in a reasonably good way, but it will depend on your platform and implementation.

As to Dir.foreach, this should be efficient too - the concern would be if it has to process the entire directory for every pass around the loop. But that would be awful implementation, and is not the case.