in reply to Fetdching filenames starting numbers.

your search() function is quite broken. Let me rewrite a bit of your code and make comments:

my $myfile = ">mytext.txt";
open(FILE, $myfile ) || "can not open: $!\n";
# please do not quote "$vars"
# $ perldoc -q 'quoting.*vars'
my ($fil,$dir) = (0,0);

sub search {
    return if /^\.+$/ or /^ws_ftp/i;
  # i don#t know what the broken syntax ala
  # ($_ != /../) should mean, but it was nonsense
  # see perlop for '=~' and perlvar for $_

  # the return statement is important
  # exiting from sub via next is bad and you'll get
  # warnings

    if( ! -l and -d _ ){
       # the _ filehandle is described in `perldoc -f stat`
       print FILE "\n\nDIRECTORY\t\t$File::Find::name\n",
         ("-" x 20) , "\n";
       $dir++;
    }
    else {
       print FILE "$_\n";
       $fil++
    }
}

[download]

consider reading about perlstyle, perloperators, perlsyntax and control statements, perlsubroutines, and of course on the 'strict' pragma and on the -w switch (perlrun) and the 'warnings' pragma.

--
http://fruiture.de

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Re: Fetdching filenames starting numbers.
by Anonymous Monk on Aug 22, 2002 at 16:57 UTC
    I thank you for giving me much needed answer and more knowledge on Perl. I am not familiar with 'return'. What does it do?
[reply]

      There's a "return" statement in nearly every procedural programming language supporting subroutines. It causes a subroutine to be stopped and to return a certain value to the caller.

      sub foo { return 1 };
$var = foo(); #$var is 1
sub bar {
    print "AAA";
    return 1;
    print "BBB"; #will never happen, for 'return' has
     # stopped this sub
}
$var = bar();

      [download]

      The breaking character of return is not present in all languages, i know ugly Pascal doesn't have a return statement and you cannot exit a sub from the middle.

      These are the very basics, try a good book to start!

      --
      http://fruiture.de
[reply]
[d/l]
        There's a "return" statement in nearly every procedural programming language supporting subroutines

        Not Visual Basic!

        --twerq
[reply]
        I cant thank you enough for your help! Thanks again.
[reply]

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