I try to traverse the diretory tree. A naive depth-first traversal seems not to produce the data in a lazy fashion and runs out of memory. I next tried a breadth first approach, which shows the same problem - it uses all the memory available and then crashes. the code i have is: getFilePathBreadtFirst :: FilePath -> IO [FilePath] getFilePathBreadtFirst fp = do fileinfo <- getInfo fp res :: [FilePath] <- if isReadableDirectory fileinfo then do children <- getChildren fp lower <- mapM getFilePathBreadtFirst children return (children ++ concat lower) return (children ++ concat () else return [fp] -- should only return the files? return res getChildren :: FilePath -> IO [FilePath] getChildren path = do names <- getUsefulContents path let namesfull = map (path </>) names return namesfull testBF fn = do -- crashes for /home/frank, does not go to swap fps <- getFilePathBreadtFirst fn putStrLn $ unlines fps I think all the code is either linear or tail recursive, and I would expect that the listing of filenames starts immediately, but in fact it does not. Where is the error in my code and my thinking? where have I lost lazy evaluation?