A) Im male, B) Why would i give you --'s for stating your opinion?, C) i checked around, i even looked at other sites, i just didnt find anything that looked like it had to do with what i wanted.

----------------------------------
I love the smell of pastures in the morning... /tell ahbeyra moo

I have some sympathy with this view, but I think it depends on the question. If it's something that is a bit obscure, but which one really ought to be able to figure out, then one should figure it out and keep quiet. But in the present case, this is a question that almost everyone is going to have to deal with in some form or other. In that case, the thread itself can become a very useful learning resource. I find I learn a lot from the dialectic between the different solutions - a dialectic which was very healthy in this thread. As well as presenting a lot of good information, it also presents it in a way that engages one's critical attention, so that one retains the knowledge far better than by reading the same stuff in a book.

So I think there's a place for this kind of thread. It does no harm to go over the basic stuff - often one can learn something unexpected from doing so. And for some of us it's not all that basic!

(For the avoidance of doubt I haven't voted anyone down on this thread - I thought it was all good stuff. A healthy dialectic, as I say.)

§ George Sherston

...

opendir(FOO, "/bar/baz");

my @files = readdir FOO;

closedir FOO;

foreach my $file (@files){

  chomp $file;

  die $predefined_die_msg if $file =~ /^file_name$/i;

}

...
[download]

#-------------
perl -e 's=$;$/=$\;W=i;$\=$/;s;;XYW\\U$"\;\);sig,$_^=$[x5,print;'
[download]

I think you'd better anchor that regex or else your /file_name/ will match a file called "this_is_a_file_named_Joe" (that is to say use /^file_name$/). Even better would be to use eq in this case (with suitable use of lc if you are using a case-insensitive file system).

A larger problem is that the directory contents could well have changed between the readdir and the testing loop, so your result won't be certain. Since you are going to die when you find a match anyway, you could just as well put the readdir in the loop condition and not bother with the array at all, which makes your test somewhat more reliable. Even so, you're still testing whether a variable (the return value of the readdir) matches a string, which does not really tell you anything certain about a file on disk.

The best solution would be to use the file test operator: die $message if -f '/ber/baz/file_name'.

Update: A fair point Tyke. Of course -e also returns true for a directory, for which one might want to be more specific using -d if one were actually looking for a directory. We don't know the greater purpose of the test in this case, but perldoc -f -X should certainly be consulted to select the best test available under the circumstances.

--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

-f tests if the file is a 'plain' file or not. If you want to test for existence you might be better off with the -e test

Thanks! lots of thanks actually, as simple as that is, i couldnt get it to work ;)

----------------------------------
I love the smell of pastures in the morning... /tell ahbeyra moo

In cgi scripts, you need to worry about more than one instance running at a time. That requires locking, as well as the exclusivity you want:

my $path = "$dir/$name";
my $fh;
use Fcntl;
sysopen ( $fh, $path, O_WRONLY|O_EXCL|O_CREAT|O_EXLOCK ) or die $!;
[download]

Update2: Added O_CREAT flag. Props to jeroenes for spotting.

After Compline,
Zaxo

When i do that, it dies regardless... is there something i could be doing wrong to causing it?

-----------------------------
I love the smell of pastures in the morning... /tell ahbeyra moo

A small wonder, if the file you try to open isn't there. The file can't be opened, and the die part is executed. Check out Albannach's post, and learn about the file test operator: -f $file.

if (-e $file_with_path) {
    # die here
}
[download]

...

open(TESTFILEHANDLE, "<$yourfilename") && die "$!, $yourfilename already exists.\n";

...

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $file = $ARGV[0]||__FILE__;

print "WARNING: $file exists\n" if( -e $file );
[download]

<a href="http://www.graq.co.uk">Graq</a>

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;  # change to -w for < 5.6 (i think)

my $file = "$ENV{'HOME'}/.poof";

if(stat($file)) {
        print "we were able to stat $file\n";
} else {
        die "$!\n"; # or warn() ...
}
[download]