Brandon,

Welcome to the wonderful world of programming - don't be discouraged, this happens to the best of us
--

OK, from what you have posted - you're main problem is a file path problem. My advice?

start fresh
but leave your current script as-is so you can see where you're coming from. Have a look at the snippet below which shows how I have used chdir() to handle the file path issue:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my ($album_id,$track_id,$filepath,%music);
$filepath = 'Y:/perlscripts2/software/perl2/music'
opendir DH, $filepath or die $!;

# magic one-liner to "fix" your path problems
chdir($filepath);

while(readdir(DH)){
    # don't evaluate special dirs '.' & '..'
    # or anything that doesn't end in .txt
    next if $_ eq "." or $_ eq ".." or $_ !~ /\.txt$/;

    # explicitly test this item to see if it's a 
    # regular file and if it's readable (notice the
    # use of the default filehandle test var '_')
    next unless -f $_ and -r _;

    # arrival here signifies we have a readable,
    # regular file. Extract its contents into a hash
    open FH, '<', $_ or die "could not open file: $_\n";

    # use the actual filename to pull the album & artist
    my ($name, $artist) = split /\-|\.txt/;
    $album_id++; $track_id = 0;
    $music{$album_id}{ALBUM}  = $name; 
    $music{$album_id}{ARTIST} = $artist; 

    while (my $line = <FH>) {
    # the lines of this file are of the format
    # <track>:<minutes>:<seconds>:<genre>
    my ($track, $minutes, $seconds, $genre) = split /\:/, $line;
    $track_id++;
    $music{$album_id}{$track_id}{TRACK}{TITLE}    = $track;
    $music{$album_id}{$track_id}{TRACK}{DURATION} = [$minutes,$seconds
+];
    $music{$album_id}{$track_id}{TRACK}{GENRE}    = $genre;
    }
    close FH;
}
print Dumper \%music;
__END__

[download]

You're almost there mate. Keep at it.

In reply to Re^7: I need help with opening a directory and reading files in that directory. by shadowsong
in thread I need help with opening a directory and reading files in that directory. by brawal128

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