Reading Directory

Sun751 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Reading Directory by moritz (Cardinal) on Jul 14, 2009 at 08:03 UTC
On Unix, every directory contains the directory `.` which is a reference to itself, and `..`, which is a reference to the parent directory. If you don't want to consider those, filter them out from the array. (Note that "reference" is a bit vague, I think it's more like a hard link, but I'm not entirely sure).	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Reading Directory by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Jul 14, 2009 at 13:33 UTC
See a tutorial I just ran across, especially section 6.1.1.3 and 6.1.3. It seems to be a reasonable description. --MidLifeXis The tomes, scrolls etc are dusty because they reside in a dusty old house, not because they're unused. --hangon in this post	[reply]
Re: Reading Directory by ELISHEVA (Prior) on Jul 14, 2009 at 08:44 UTC
Take a look at File::Spec's `no_upwards` method. It lets you (portably) skip the dot directories: `use strict; use warnings; use File::Spec; my @x; opendir(DIR, $dir) or die "Can't open directory $dir: $!"; eval { @x = File::Spec->no_upwards(readdir(DIR)); }; closedir(DIR); print "@x\n";` [download] Best, beth	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Reading Directory by Anonymous Monk on Jul 14, 2009 at 08:00 UTC
perldoc -f readdir	[reply]
Re: Reading Directory by tokpela (Chaplain) on Jul 14, 2009 at 09:25 UTC
I would also add that for scalability you should always iterate over a directory as opposed to pushing all of the filenames into an array. I would also use a lexical directory handle. `my $dir = "/and/evel/aap/list/60"; opendir(my $d, $dir) \|\| die "Unable to open $dir "; while (my $filename = readdir($d)) { # removes . and .. next if ($filename =~ /^\.+$/); my $filepath = "$dir/$filename"; ..... } closedir($d);` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Reading Directory by ropey (Hermit) on Jul 14, 2009 at 11:10 UTC
Or use grep to filter the directory `@a = grep {$_ !~ /^\.{1,2}$/} readdir(PATCH);` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Reading Directory by Sun751 (Beadle) on Jul 14, 2009 at 23:28 UTC
Hi there your grep seems to work but can you make me understand how?, I am not getting this "!~" business. suggestion please, Cheers	[reply]
Re^3: Reading Directory by toolic (Bishop) on Jul 14, 2009 at 23:45 UTC
I am not getting this "!~" business From Binding Operators: Binary "!~" is just like "=~" except the return value is negated in the logical sense.	[reply]


Come for the quick hacks, stay for the epiphanies.
	PerlMonks