Directory Stuff

Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am using ActivePerl on a windows 2000 machine. My script reads all the files in a directory, does some reformating and plops them all into one big file in another directory. My script wrks if I have the .pl in the same dirctory as the files and use the ".". But, If i use a path to the directory it does not work. Any thoughts. thanks for any info, Bernie

#!/usr/bin/perl

#Parses web log and reformats




opendir(DIR, 'c:\perl\test');  ##If . is used and .pl is in the same d
+ir as files it works!
@files = readdir(DIR);
close(DIR);
        foreach $file (@files)
    {
        $name = $file;
        @filename = split (/\./, $name);
#               open (MYFILE, ">myfile.txt");
                open( THEFILE,$file ) ;
        @theList = <THEFILE>;   
        close( THEFILE );
        
                foreach( @theList )
                    {
                    s/\/uid=/,/;
                    s/LDAP:\/\///;
                    s/ou=//g;
                    s/o=//;
                    @theLine = split( /\s*,\s*/ );
                                        print "\"$theLine[0]\",\"$theL
+ine[1]\",$theLine[2]\",\"$theLine[3]\",\"$theLine[4]\",\"$theLine[5]\
+",\"$theLine[6],\"$filename[0]\",\"$filename[1]\",$theLine[7]  \n";
                    }
    }    

exit( 0 );
[download]

Comment on Directory Stuff Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Directory Stuff by Jenda (Abbot) on Apr 18, 2003 at 14:41 UTC
`readdir()` returns just the NAME of the file, not the PATH! Therefore if you `opendir DIR, $path` [download] you have to `open THEFILE, "< $path/$file" or die "Can't open $path/$file: $!\n";` [download] HTH, Jenda Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live. -- Rick Osborne Edit by castaway: Closed small tag in signature	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Directory Stuff by dws (Chancellor) on Apr 18, 2003 at 15:49 UTC
But, If i use a path to the directory it does not work. You might have been able to figure this out for yourself if your script didn't ignore useful clues. If a library routine returns an error by setting $!, check it! That means writing `opendir(DIR, 'c:/perl/test') or die "c:/perl/test: $!"; ... open(MYFILE, ">myfile.txt") or die "myfile.txt: $!"; open(THEFILE, "<$file") or die "$file: $!"; ...` [download] Purists will tell you to also do `close(MYFILE) or die "c:/perl/test: $!";` [download] in case the disk fills up and the script is unable to cleanly close the file. That said, understanding that readdir() returns names, not paths, is key to understanding the problem. Here, consulting the perl documentation help. The blurb on readdir() in perlfunc spells it right out: If you're planning to filetest the return values out of a readdir, you'd better prepend the directory in question. Otherwise, because we didn't chdir there, it would have been testing the wrong file.	[reply] [d/l] [select]