hey ho ppl

This question is really about deleting a file from a directory containing a few thousand files.

Lets begin... I need to unlink 1 file but the only data I have is the id which starts the filename. Thus I need to use filename globbing, which on a few thousand files takes some time.

opendir(DIR,"/path") || die("No opendir on $path\n");
my @files = grep { /^${id}\_.*$/ } readdir DIR;
closedir(DIR);

my $filename = "/path/$files[0]";
unlink("$filename") || die("No unlink on $filename\n");

[download]

Please excuse the shoddy code and lack of error checking, but its only an example.

Rather than having to grep the whole dir everytime I want to delete a file, is there a simpler and more importantly faster way that I'm for some reason blind to?

Thanks for any help
Orthanc

In reply to removing a needle from a haystack by orthanc

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