Dear PerlMonks,

I am relatively new with Perl. I am trying to delete some old files from a directory based on, if it is not listed in the file and this file has a SDF file extension.

I have an array (@file) that contains a list of all the file name in the directory. And another array (@name) contains a list of all the lines from the SDF file.

What I like to do is to compare the two arrays and find the file name that is not listed in the SDF file.

The SDF file contains lines like:

• fullpath="C:\directory\filename1.nfo"
• id="1a"
• fullpath="C:\directory\filename2.nfo"

I've been searching the web and found some good examples but not exactly on what I am trying to do. I have tried using "!($name =~ $filename)", it just delete all the files in the directory. I think there is something wrong with the logic in the loop but not sure where. Below, is my code that are able to find the matching files. I am wondering if you can help.

Thank you in advance for your help.

#!\perl\bin\perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $files = "C:\\Directory";
my $list = "C:\\Test.sdf";

my @name;
open(my $name, "< $list") or die "Failed to open file: $!\n";
 while(<$name>) { 
  chomp; 
  push @name, $_;
 } 
close $name;

my @file = $files;
opendir(OUTPUT, $files);
  @file = readdir(OUTPUT);
closedir(OUTPUT);

foreach my $filename (@file) {
  foreach $name  (@name) {
    if ($name =~ $filename) {
      last;
    }else {
      unlink ($files . "\\" . $filename) or warn qq{cannot delete $fil
+ename: $!+};
      last;
    }
  }
}
[download]

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