I am having a bit of trouble understanding what exactly you are trying to accomplish... but I'll try to help you anyway.

How many times does the word "FOO" show up in a file name?

There is are more ways to do this than you can shake a stick at (why you would go around shaking sticks at things I have no idea..) but I will propose a couple here.

Shell method

$ ls | grep FOO | wc -l
[download]

Perl method

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 
use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

my $path="/some/where/over/the/rainbow";

opendir(DIR,$path) or die "$!";
my @list=readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);

my @collect=grep /FOO/,@list;
my $count = $#collect + 1;

printf "total count = %d\n",$count;
[download]

How many times does the word "FOO" show up in a file in my directory?

Ahh... here is a better problem, one with a pair of fine solutions!

Shell Method

$ grep FOO * | wc -l
[download]

Perl Method

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 
use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

my $path="/some/where/over/the/rainbow";

open (DIR,$path) or die "$!";
my @file_list=readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);

my $count = 0;

foreach my $file(@file_list){
    open(FIN,"< $file") or die "$file: $!";
    my @slurp=<FIN>;
    close(FIN);

    my @collect=grep /FOO/,@slurp;
    $count += ($#collect + 1);
}

printf "My total count was: %d\n",$count;
[download]

A couple of things I should point out:

• Using the die in conjunction with opendir and/or open can give you some idea if you are running into permission issues, path issues, fat fingerings and the like.
• Likewise "use strict;", "use warnings;" and "use diagnostics"

Hope this helps.

---

Peter @ Berghold . Net

Sieze the cow! Bite the day!

Test the code? We don't need to test no stinkin' code! All code posted here is as is where is unless otherwise stated.

Brewer of Belgian style Ales