Today I was asked to change the expression "origtext" to "changedtext" on every file within a large directory structure. For lack of knowledge of a better tool I decided to use perl and File::Find. My question is about File::Find in general so I'll post the bare skeleton that I wrote to just list the files that are about to be changed (i.e. a grep type script).

What I encountered was my find.pl script (listed below) ran out of memory on the machine when I ran the script on the base directory (containing 395 subdirectories). I ended up writing a small script to do the find.pl script on one sub-directory at a time.

Was the out of memory problem due to a failure in my use of perl, die I miss something in the File::Find pod, or is it due to the way File::Find works on recursion?

This is the script that lists the files I'm going to change, really just a test that I had the RE and other bits right before actually changing files.
find.pl 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

use File::Find;


my($find, @directories) = (@ARGV);
unless (scalar @directories) {
    print "Usage: find.pl FINDSTRING DIR1...\n";
    exit;
}

find(\&do_this, @directories);

exit;

sub do_this {
    if(! -f $_) {  # if it's not a regular file skip it
        return;
    }

    if(open(F, $_)) {
        undef $/;
        my $file = <F>;

        if((defined $file) 
                && ($file ne '')
                && ($file =~ /\Q$find\E/giso)) {
                    # the if defined was added
                    # later after I realized that an
                    # empty file would leave $file undef!
            print "$File::Find::name\n";
        }
        close(F);
    }
    else {
        warn "Unable to open '$_': $!";
    }
}

[download]


Just a note in the end the job was accomplished I ask now for learning purposes so next time I can do it better or more correctly.

Thanks for any advice you can give, including general critique,
James

In reply to Is this normal for File::Find or where did I go wrong. by illitrit

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