[Carpet] Carpet IO oddity

[Thomas Radke]

Erik Schnetter wrote:
> We could, however, have the I/O subsystem (not the driver) check  whether the output directory is empty when it is created.  A new  parameter IO::require_empty_output_directory or  IO::require_new_output_directory could be introduced for this.  This  would be checked right after the call to IOUtil_CreateDirectory in  IOUtil's Startup.c.

Good suggestion ! I put it on my list.

> Thomas, the second case (requiring that the output directory does not  
> yet exist) is easy to check.  But how does one check whether a  
> directory is empty?

One could use the readdir(3) function for that purpose. It is already 
used in CactusBase/IOUtil in order to find the latest checkpoint file in 
IO::recover = "auto" mode.

-- 
Cheers, Thomas.