Probably an easy one ...

I have a piece of code that hashes a directory structure using the use File::Recurse package. It looks like ... 
%files = Recurse([$drive], {match => '\.'});

[download]
... and then I can shuffle through it like so ... 
    foreach $dir (sort keys %files)
    {
      foreach $file (@{ $files{$dir} })
      {
        # Do work
      }
    }

[download]
The trouble is that there are literally millions of files in the hash and as you can imagine, that's taking up a lot of memory ... don't ask. The process is able to hash the entire structure without any trouble but somewhere in loop of the program I get "Out Of Memory" errors. Undoubtedly this is the result of the aforementioned hash. I don't need to keep any element of that hash around after I have used it, so my question is, "How do I delete the entries from the hash one-by-one? In other words, how do I deallocate the memory of an entry in the hash individually or is it even possible? Obviously, I hope this would allow me to avoid the memory errors, thought I fear that might happen at the expense of a great deal of memory management overhead.

Between a rock and a hard place,
Pearte

PS - If anyone has a better strategy for dealing with as many files, I'd like to hear it.

In reply to Hash Entry Deallocation by Pearte

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.