Hello monks...

I recently sold an article to Better Software magazine. This is the first technical article I've ever written, and I'm asking for the monks' help reviewing my code.

There are two scripts: one is a trivial implementation of File::Find to make an inventory report; the other uses List::Compare to create a difference report on inventories created by the first script. The point of doing this is to identify files missing from one inventory to the next inventory; and to identify new files in the second inventory.

The audience for the article is manual software testers aka QA people thinking about starting to learn a scripting language. It's an audience comfortable and familiar with computers, but completely new to (and possibly uncomfortable about) programming. The point is to show that writing simple, powerful scripts is Not That Hard, so I have lots of comments and have kept the syntax as clean as possible.

Do I have enough comments? Is the syntax reasonably clear? Am I giving the reader enough information to figure out what's going on? Have I made any mistakes?

Your comments are welcome-- particularly newbies and those who've come to Perl from other languages.

#################################################
#!/usr/bin/perl 
#InventoryReport.pl 

###Good Perl practice:
use warnings;       
use strict;  

###CPAN module finds files recursively     
use File::Find;     

###Report file:
open (OUT, ">InventoryFile.txt");  

###Top-level directory to report on:
my $directory = '//InstallBox/C';   

###invoking File::Find, printing path, then filename:
find (\&wanted, $directory);        
sub wanted {
    print OUT "$File::Find::dir/";  
    print OUT "$_\n";          
    }
__END__
#################################################

#################################################
#!/usr/bin/perl 
#CompareReport.pl

###good Perl practice:
use warnings; 
use strict; 

###invoke the CPAN module:
use List::Compare; 

###open some files:
open (OUT, ">CDiffs.txt"); 
open (FILE1, "OldInventory.txt"); 
open (FILE2, "NewInventory.txt"); 

###idiomatic: lowercase each pathname string after loading the arrays—
###(this is a Windows system, might not want to “lc” for Unix):
my @file1 = <FILE1>;
$_ = lc for @file1;    
my @file2 = <FILE2>;
$_ = lc for @file2;


###load the files for List::Compare:
my $lc = List::Compare->new(\@file1, \@file2);  

###List::Compare features to identify unique elements in each file:
my @file1only = $lc->get_Lonly;  
my @file2only = $lc->get_Ronly;  

###talk to the user:
print OUT "IGNORING FILES WITH Tmp OR Temp IN PATHNAME.\n";
print OUT "IGNORING FILES IN THE RECYCLE BIN.\n";
print OUT "IGNORING ALL HISTORY FILES.\n";
print OUT "LOWERCASING ALL FILE AND PATHNAMES BEFORE COMPARING.\n";

###selection criteria is a set of easy Regular Expressions:
foreach my $file1(@file1only) {
    unless (($file1 =~ "tmp") or ($file1=~"temp") or ($file1 =~ "recyc
+ler") or ($file1 =~ "history")) { 
        print OUT $file1;
        }
}

###separator is a couple of newlines:
print OUT "\n\n"; 

###talk to the user about the second file:
print OUT "IGNORING FILES WITH Tmp OR Temp IN PATHNAME.\n";
print OUT "IGNORING FILES IN THE RECYCLE BIN.\n";
print OUT "IGNORING ALL HISTORY FILES.\n"; 
print OUT "LOWERCASING ALL FILE AND PATHNAMES BEFORE COMPARING.\n";
print "\n\n";
 
###selection for the second inventory file:
foreach my $file2(@file2only) {
    unless (($file2 =~ "tmp") or ($file2=~"temp") or ($file2 =~ "recyc
+ler") or ($file2 =~ "history")) {
        print OUT $file2;
        }
}
__END__
##############################################
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