Per the documentation, preprocess receives a list (of entries in the current directory), and is expected to return a list (of entries). The purpose for this functionality is to provide you the ability to prune, filter, reorganize etc the list of entries as you sweep over them before the wanted function is called (it receives the list returned from preprocess).

The most basic test you can do is just immediately return the list the begin function receives:

sub begin {
    my @entries = @_;
    print "begin\n";
    return @entries;
}

[download]

The reason you're getting "1", is because that's what a successful print statement returns, and in Perl, if you don't have an explicit return(), the result of the last expression evaluated is returned (in your case, the result of the print, meaning "1").

my $x = print "hi\n";
print "$x\n";

__END__
hi
1

[download]

In reply to Re^3: File::Find preprocess by stevieb
in thread File::Find preprocess by pvaldes

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.