in reply to Re: dbf_dump to apply to multiple files in a directory
in thread dbf_dump to apply to multiple files in a directory

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

  • Comment on Re^2: dbf_dump to apply to multiple files in a directory

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Re^3: dbf_dump to apply to multiple files in a directory
by AppleFritter (Vicar) on Aug 03, 2014 at 20:56 UTC

    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" > "$file.csv"}) == 0 or die "system() failed (\$?=$?)"; }

    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.

      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.