A Perl novice on my third and most serious attempt in ten years at learning the language.

As an exercise, I've cobbled together the following script from example snippets. It's supposed to recursively list directories starting at either the current directory or the directory specified by a command-line argument (-d).

I'd love to know why the thing seems unwilling to go deeper than about three levels. Now, before anyone criticizes how this was written: I know this is probably a very un-Perl-like program. I know that File::Find is a better tool. But it seems as though my approach should work.

If anyone could help shed light as to why this program isn't behaving as expected, I'd be very grateful.

------------------- 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use Cwd;
use Getopt::Std;
use vars qw($opt_d);
getopt('d');

local $start_dir = ($opt_d) ? $opt_d : getcwd;

print "\n";
listDir($start_dir);
print ("\n\nfinished.\n\n");

sub listDir {
    local $thisdir = $_[0];
    print "\n$thisdir:\n";
    opendir THISDIR, $thisdir;
    #get all entries, filter in directories
    # then filter out .. and .
    local @allentries =  readdir THISDIR;
    local @directories = sort grep !/^\.\.?$/, (grep -d, @allentries);
    local $entry = "";
    closedir THISDIR;
    foreach $entry(@allentries) {
    print "\t$entry\n";
    }
    foreach $entry (@directories) {
    chomp($entry);
        &listDir($thisdir . '/' . $entry );
    }   
}

[download]
-------------

Additional info:

I'm running this in a Cygwin sh on WinNT (blech, chhhhhk ptooey). Haven't tried it yet on a "real" *nix environment, yet. Perl v5.6.1.

In reply to Recursive Directory Listing by jeddak

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.