sjd6 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Monks, I thought i'd better ask those with a superior knowledge to make sure the following problem can be solved before wasting huge amounts of time researching it...

Does anyone know if it is at all possible to create a script, that when specified a particular folder dir, can scan that folder and any sub folders inside it, for a file with a particular extension (.txt for example), open it, process a script already created (to extract some content and write it to a file in the root folder), close it and continue scanning for other files with the extension?

I assume, if possible, the code for this will be quite complex. If anyone can give me some pointers, that would be fantastic!

Thanks all

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: file lookup
by broquaint (Abbot) on Oct 09, 2003 at 15:11 UTC
    You're most of the way there with the likes of File::Find::Rule at your side 
    use File::Find::Rule;

for(find(file => name => "*.txt", in => "your_dir_here")) {
  ## do stuff here
}

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    That will iterate over the filenames of all the files in 'your_dir_here' and its subdirectores with the .txt extension. See. the File::Find::Rule docs for more information on this most marvellous of modules.
    HTH

    _________
    broquaint

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Re: file lookup
by Corion (Patriarch) on Oct 09, 2003 at 15:12 UTC

    I guess you are seeking to duplicate the functionality already found in the xargs command.

    For Perl, there is the module File::Find::Rule, which makes it very easy and convenient to find all files that match a certain criterion.

    After you have obtained that list of interesting files, you just have to use the system function of Perl for each entry in the list of interesting files :

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

my @interesting_files = File::Find::Rule->file()
                                        ->name('*.txt')
                                        ->in(@ARGV);
for my $filename (@interesting_files) {
  system("my_program $filename");
};

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    perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web

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Re: file lookup
by Abigail-II (Bishop) on Oct 09, 2003 at 15:17 UTC
    I wouldn't use Perl for that. 'find' will do that perfectly. Let's say you want to process "/path/to/dir", and your prepared script is called "/some/script". Then, from the command line: 
        $ find /path/to/dir -name "*.txt" -exec /some/script {} \;

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    And yes, find is there for Windows as well.

    Abigail

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      If you insist on perl, you have find2perl,

      Here is the output of find2perl 

      $ find2perl  /path/to/dir -name "*.txt" -exec /some/script {}

#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w
    eval 'exec /usr/local/bin/perl -S $0 ${1+"$@"}'
        if 0; #$running_under_some_shell

use strict;
use File::Find ();

# Set the variable $File::Find::dont_use_nlink if you're using AFS,
# since AFS cheats.

# for the convenience of &wanted calls, including -eval statements:
use vars qw/*name *dir *prune/;
*name   = *File::Find::name;
*dir    = *File::Find::dir;
*prune  = *File::Find::prune;


# Traverse desired filesystems
File::Find::find({wanted => \&wanted}, '/path/to/dir');
exit;


sub wanted {
    /^.*\.txt\z/s &&
    &doexec(0, '/some/script','{}');
}


BEGIN {
    require Cwd;
    my $cwd = Cwd::cwd();
}

sub doexec {
    my $ok = shift;
    for my $word (@_)
        { $word =~ s#{}#$name#g }
    if ($ok) {
        my $old = select(STDOUT);
        $| = 1;
        print "@_";
        select($old);
        return 0 unless <STDIN> =~ /^y/;
    }
    chdir $cwd; #sigh
    system @_;
    chdir $File::Find::dir;
    return !$?;
}

      [download]

      -T

      use perl; use strict;

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