I use this script when I recursively (i.e., with wget(1)) web-suck a site and have hundreds (sometimes thousands, as in the case of rfc's or recipes or such things) of files named things like "1001.html" "1002.html" and so on. This little snippet takes every file in the current directory and writes it to a hash as a scalar. You can then take this hash and run searches on it (such as in the case of RFC's or looking for a recipe that contains tuna, mustard, and noodles). Useful, tiny, and even better, it works!

Your files are written to a file called 'brick'. Move that to wherever you're working on your neato searching script.

note: the warnings pragma is a 5.6ism.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use strict;
use Carp;
use Storable qw{ freeze };
use File::Slurp;

my %html_files;

opendir TD, '.' or croak $!;

foreach my $file (readdir TD) {
  $html_files{$file} = read_file($file);
}

my $brick = freeze( \%html_files );

open OUT, ">brick" or croak $!;

print OUT $brick;

close OUT or carp $!;

exit 0; # 'good' exit for the shell
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