in reply to File Name Pattern

Requirement 1:

Find filenames within a directory that look like '\A\d+\.jpg\z'. (I prefer \A and \z over ^ and $ as \A and \z match 'beginning of string' and 'end of string' as opposed to 'beginning of line' and 'end of line')

my(@filenames, $directory); opendir($directory, $directory_path) or die "opendir of $directory_path failed: $!\n"; @filenames = grep /\A\d+\.jpg\z/, readdir($directory); closedir($directory);

Requirement 2:

Extend filenames such that they follow the form '\A\d{6,}\z'.

$filename = sprintf("%06d.jpg", $1) if $filename =~ /\A(\d+)\.jpg\z/;

Requirement 3:

Creating directory (if it does not already exist) and moving files into the directory.

use File::Spec; -d $subdir_path or mkdir($subdir_path, 0777) or die "mkdir of $subdir_path failed: $!\n"; rename($filename, File::Spec->catfile($subdir_path, $filename)) or die "rename of $filename failed: $!\n";

Requirement 4:

Matching the first three (or more?) digits in the string.

$filename =~ /\A(\d*)\d{3}\.jpg\z/; # result stored in $1

Final Solution:

Putting this all together, we get:

use File::Spec; for my $directory_path (@ARGV) { my $directory; my @filenames; # Determine @filenames to work with in $directory_path. opendir($directory, $directory_path) or die "opendir of $directory_path failed: $!\n"; @filenames = grep /\A\d+\.jpg\z/, readdir($directory); closedir($directory); for (@filenames) { my($basename, $prefix) = /\A((.+).{3})\.jpg\z/s or next; my $subdir_path = File::Spec->catdir($directory_path, $prefix) +; # Create the subdir if it does not yet exist. -d $subdir_path or mkdir($subdir_path, 0777) or die "mkdir of $subdir_path failed: $!\n"; my $old_path = File::Spec->catfile($directory_path, $_); my $new_path = File::Spec->catfile($subdir_path, sprintf("%06d +.jpg", $basename)); # Move the file to the subdir. rename($old_path, $new_path) or die "rename of $old_path to $new_path failed: $!\n"; } }

Edit to by tye to remove PRE tags around CODE tags