in reply to dbf_dump to apply to multiple files in a directory

Howdy solanum, welcome to the Monastery!

You don't actually need Perl for this. The following would also work (if you're using bash or a similar shell; I don't have any experience with C shells): 

$ for i in *.dbf; do dbf_dump --fs "," "$i" >"$i.csv"; done

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If you want to use Perl, my anonymous brothers have already provided some advice. The main problem with your script is that you're trying to call an external command (dbf_dump) as you would from a shell script. But Perl isn't a shell, it's a programming language, so you have to use a function like system to run external commands.

The error you're getting is related to that: "bareword found where operator expected, near "--fs"" tells you that Perl is trying to parse your dbf_dump invocation as Perl and failing to make sense of it.

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Re^2: dbf_dump to apply to multiple files in a directory
by solanum (Initiate) on Aug 03, 2014 at 19:14 UTC

    Unfortunately, this needed to be done in perl. However, thank you, I will keep this in mind

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      You're welcome!

      Here's another tip: although you can of course use opendir and grep to get your list of files, Perl also has a built-in function called glob for filename expansions. Using that, the code that my anonymous brother posted in Re: dbf_dump to apply to multiple files in a directory simplifies to: 

      #!/usr/bin/env perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use IPC::System::Simple qw/system/; # recommended but optional

foreach my $file (glob "*.dbf") {
    system(qq{dbf_dump --fs "," "$file" > "$file.csv"}) == 0
        or die "system() failed (\$?=$?)";
}

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      I've also replaced $_ with $file here -- $_ is not otherwise used and never assigned any value --, and put quotes around the CSV file's name to avoid problems with filenames that contain spaces.

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        I think glob should always come with a disclaimer to read its docs (including File::Glob) because it has a lot of functionality under the hood. In this case it may work fine, but for example it won't list files that begin with a dot. And once people start writing glob($pattern_I_got_somewhere) things can get real fun with wildcards and such.

        Whenever I don't want glob's features getting in the way of having full control of which files get listed, I prefer readdir or File::Find.

        P.S. Thanks for catching the $_, I missed that above.

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