I want to find all of a certain type of file in a directory tree (in this case JPEGs) and simply print them. My problem is the recursion through the tree. Here is what I am using: 
my $root_dir = '/top/directory/to/start/search';

RunDirs($root_dir);

sub RunDirs {
        my $dir = shift;
opendir(TMP_D,"$dir") or die "$! opening $dir";

        while(my $tmp = readdir(TMP_D)) {
                $tmp = "$dir/$tmp";
                if ($tmp =~ /\.\.?/) { next; }
                if (-d $tmp) {
                        RunDirs("$tmp");     
                } elsif ($tmp =~ /^(\w*)\.(jpg|jpeg)$/) {
                        print "$tmp\n";     
                }
        }
        closedir(TMP_D);
}

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It works, but it only goes through the first branch, and then stops...for example, say this was a directory structure of mine that I was searching: 
-| ROOT
-|-| SUB 1
-|-|-| SUB 1.1
-|-|-|-| SUB 1.1.1
-|-|-|-|-| SUB 1.1.1.1
-|-|-|-|-| SUB 1.1.1.2
-|-|-| SUB 2.1
-|-| SUB 2
-|-|-| SUB 2.1
-|-|-| SUB 2.2

[download]
The program would only search through the first tree it hits, then stop. In the above example, it would search this and stop: 
ROOT -> SUB 1 -> SUB 1.1 -> SUB 1.1.1 -> SUB 1.1.1.1

[download]
but it would never get to SUB 1.1.1.2 or SUB 2.1 or SUB 2 or anything, it just stops. I thought that after it had hit the bottom of a certain tree, it would start going back up naturally because of the recursion I used (calling RunDirs multiple times) because the instances of RunDirs() for the higher directories would still be open, and therefore would just grab another entry from readdir(). But obviously, this isn't that is happening? What am I doing wrong - I didn't think directory searching was very difficult, but I guess I am doing something wrong!

Thanks for all the help!
R.Joseph

In reply to Procesing directories by r.joseph

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