Editing multiple xml files in perl with help of Getopt::Long and Globbing

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

Hi,

I am using a perl script edit certain xml tags. Previously i was picking up the xml files one by one and running the code. But I thought it would be easy if i can edit all xml files in a single go.

Below is the part of my code

 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Long;
use XML::Twig;
foreach my $xml(@file)
{
$twig->parsefile_inplace($xml);
}
sub getoption{
GetOptions ("file=s" => \$data,) or die("Error in command line argumen
+ts\n");
@file=glob($data); #globbing to pick '*.xml'
}
[download]

The code seems to work. But i would like to know if there is a better way to do and also if there is any pitfall the way i do it now.

Script calls

./script -f config.xml
./script -f '*.xml'
[download]

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Re: Editing multiple xml files in perl with help of Getopt::Long and Globbing by hippo (Archbishop) on Nov 30, 2013 at 11:08 UTC
Unless you are doing something else with other options to the script which you aren't showing us, I don't see any reason for you to do the globbing in the script. Why not just use the shell's globbing instead? If you invoke the script with: `./script *.xml` and handle this in your code with: `while (my $file = shift @ARGV) { next unless -r $file; # Process the file here }` [download] would that not achieve the end result?	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^2: Editing multiple xml files in perl with help of Getopt::Long and Globbing by Jim (Curate) on Nov 30, 2013 at 16:32 UTC
Shell globbing isn't universal or portable. So in many cases, it's appropriate to expand globs within the Perl script using File::Glob or other mechanism. For example, in the Microsoft Windows shell (Command Prompt), wildcards are not as powerful or as useful as BSD-style globs; in particular, they can't be used to expand directories (folder), which makes them generally useless for my purposes. I invariably need my Perl scripts to permit their users to glob multiple folder names.	[reply]
Re^2: Editing multiple xml files in perl with help of Getopt::Long and Globbing by chidori (Novice) on Nov 30, 2013 at 13:17 UTC
Sorry , didn't mention in my intial post. Yes, i have other options that will get the date and another option to print the xml content. Thats why i didn't do shell globbing.	[reply]