Tip #2 from the Basic debugging checklist: print. The reason you get no output is that $tmpfilecount is 0. $tmpfilecount is 0 because you set it to 0 in your foreach loop, then you never change its value. The only thing you do with the variable is pass it as an input to your countThem sub.

• strict
• perltidy

Hello toolic,

The only thing you do with the variable is pass it as an input to your countThem sub.

Yes, but the variable $tmpfilecount is a package global (no my in sight, as you note), and within sub countThem the variable $_[0] is an alias to the variable passed as the first argument. Therefore the line:

$_[0]=$filecount;
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within the sub actually should change $tmpfilecount to the value of $filecount. Proof of concept:

 0:42 >perl -wE "sub f { ++$_[0] } $x = 42; f($x); say $x;"
43

 0:43 >
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So the problem is that $filecount is never incremented.

Athanasius <°(((>< contra mundum

Iustus alius egestas vitae, eros Piratica,

Hello Griegomas, and welcome to the Monastery!

I have a hunch it is the "" around ext1 in my find statements...

Yes, exactly. Suppose the value of $ext1 is txt. Then the regular expression /\"$ext1"$/ will match a filename such as example."txt" but not a filename such as example.txt.

...but the first $ was causing problems without it and I wasn't sure how else to resolve the issue.

There shouldn’t be any problem:

 1:11 >perl -wE "my $ext = 'txt'; my $file = 'example.txt'; say 'match
+es' if $file =~ /$ext$/;"
matches

 1:12 >
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Regular expressions interpolate (except when single quotes are used as the delimiters) — see perlop#Quote-and-Quote-like-Operators. Please explain the problem you were seeing (give details).

Hope that helps,

Thanks Anthanasius, that makes sense to me. This is the error I was seeing: Name "main::ext1" used only once: possible typo at ./perl4.pl line 8.

Others have answered what was wrong, i wanted to show you a completely better way to solve the problem:

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find::Rule;

my @found = File::Find::Rule
    ->file()
    ->name( map "*$_", @ARGV )
    ->in( '.' )
;
print scalar( @found ), $/;
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L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)

The memory efficient version

#!/usr/bin/perl --
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find::Rule qw/ find rule /;
my $count = 0;
my $size  = 0;
rule(
    file =>
    name => [ map {"*$_"} @ARGV ],
    exec => sub {
        ## my( $shortname, $path, $fullname ) = @_;
        $size += -s _; ## or use $_
        $count++;
        return !!0; ## means discard filename
    },
)->in('.');
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Hello again Griegomas,

I see you have updated your post to incorporate some of the advice given (but still no strict). In itself, that’s good. However, your re-write of the OP has the unfortunate effect of removing context from the following replies, which makes it hard for monks to follow the thread. For small changes, you can use <strike>...</strike> tags, but for large-scale changes such as this, it would be better to put the update (clearly marked as such) at the foot of the original code. Better still would be to start a new node, since your update includes a new question.

This results in an extension like .h finding all files that end with h.

That’s because the . has a special meaning within a regular expression. To remove that special meaning — in other words, to get whatever text is in $ARGV[0] to be treated literally — you need to enclose the text within the escape sequence \Q ... \E:

12:04 >perl -we "my @files = qw(yes.h noh); for (@files) { printf qq[%
+s: %s\n], $_, /$ARGV[0]$/ ? 'match' : 'no match'; }" .h
yes.h: match
noh: match

12:07 >perl -we "my @files = qw(yes.h noh); for (@files) { printf qq[%
+s: %s\n], $_, /\Q$ARGV[0]\E$/ ? 'match' : 'no match'; }" .h
yes.h: match
noh: no match

12:07 >
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See More on characters, strings, and character classes in perlretut.

Hope that helps,

If needed you could use a code prettifier, such as Perltidy, a Perl script which indents and reformats Perl scripts to make them easier to read.