Sorry if the questioner is even dumber than his question but the example in the documentation works - even on my system. The problem I am encountering is when you stray from the example given and attempt to use the other functions. The following code
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Filesys::DiskFree;
$handle = new Filesys::DiskFree ;
$handle->disks() ;
-
- doesn't fail, it just returns nothing, nada etc I thought that the above would return any discs found to the screen. I hope that they are stored in some hash table/array or something. The problem is where to look? Cheers, Ronnie

You probably want to uncomment your definition of which disk you want to check; and you probably want to capture what 'new' returns into a handle so you can all the 'avail' method.

Check the documentation -- there's probably a short example provided.

The comment is on the previous line to the declaration of the disc variable. I have looked at the documentation and to use a very British phrase the words "As much use as a chocolate fireguard" spring to mind. (But that could just as easily be because I'm in dumber than a politician mode! Cheers, Ronnie

get the error message - Can't call method "avail" on an undefined value.

Ronnie,
To paraphraase the man page for this module:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
######################################
 
use strict;
use warnings;
use Filesys::DiskFree;
  
my $handle = new Filesys::DiskFree; # ASSIGN HANDLE!
$handle->df();
print "The root device is ".$handle->device("/")."\n";
print "It has ".$handle->avail("/")." bytes available\n";
print "It has ".$handle->total("/")." bytes total\n";
print "It has ".$handle->used("/")." bytes used\n";
[download]

The root device is /dev/hda1
It has 669364224 bytes available
It has 9253654528 bytes total
It has 8114221056 bytes used
[download]

Hope this helps.

Interesting, I'm not sure if that module has the same lineage as Filesys::Df, but for many years I have had reliable operations with the following:

use Filesys::Df;

for my $filesys ( qw { / /usr /opt /sybase /spooltmp /var  /home
 } ) {
    my $df = df( $filesys );
    next if $df->{used} < 0 or 0 == $df->{user_blocks};
    push @df, [ $filesys, $df->{used} / $df->{user_blocks}, $df->{bava
+il}*1024 ];
}
[download]

The < 0 was a work-around for some crappy Solaris NFS code that used to return negative numbers on large (>2GB) NFS mounts, it's probably no longer needed.

I just checked on CPAN: both modules are fairly old (which doesn't mean anything negative!) although Filesys::Df was updated more recently.

Personally, I'm quite happy with the procedural approach in this case, I don't think that the OO approach is a win here.

Am I being particularily stupid here?

Ah yes actually. Where do you define handle?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Filesys::DiskFree;
$disc = '/dev/vx/dsk/var';

# get a handle object, you need to assign it to a var!
my $hadle = new Filesys::DiskFree;

# call a method on handle object but where do the ret vals go?
# if you want them you will need to put them into a var!
#$handle->avail($disc);
# assuming this method returns an array as you suggest
my @res = $handle->avail($disc);
use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper \@res;
[download]

Nope! It seems that I'm not the only one that can't get this to work! Funnily enough I have tried returning the output to a variable (List &/or Scalar) and they remain resolutely empty! This module must store the output somewhere and that's the real problem - where? Any ideas? The following code -
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Filesys::DiskFree;
$handle = new Filesys::DiskFree ;
my $count = 0 ;
$disc = '/dev/vx/dsk/var';
my $crap = $handle->device($disc) ;
print "\n\t$crap\n" ;
when run results in -

Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at acc_filestore_monitor.pl line 8.

That would be because crap is empty. Trying the disks method returning the results (or so I thought) to an array produced the same error. I'm quite willing to accept that I can be somewhat dim at times but, not being familiar with methods etc to any great degree, I do think that the description of this module and it's use would leave someone with more knowledge on the subject scratching their heads! I'm probably going to use Filesys::Df to perform this function but I would like to get to the bottom of this as I don't like to be defeated in this fashion.
Cheers Ronnie "currently vanquished" Cruickshank

This is vitually straight out of the docs. Having read the ten lines of synopsis you have to call it like this which as you see performs as desired. The issue is that the df() method need to be called (it calls df(1) and caches the results) so that most of the other methods have data to work with. When reading those docs substitute Filesys::DiskFree->method() with $handle->method() and you should have no issues:

[root@devel3 root]# cat diskfree.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

use Filesys::DiskFree;

$handle = new Filesys::DiskFree;
$handle->df();
my $device = $ARGV[0] || "/";
print "The $device device is ".$handle->device($device)."\n";
print "It has ".$handle->avail($device)." bytes available\n";
print "It has ".$handle->total($device)." bytes total\n";
print "It has ".$handle->used($device)." bytes used\n";

[root@devel3 root]# ./diskfree.pl
The / device is /dev/sda3
It has 79425527808 bytes available
It has 142137049088 bytes total
It has 55491371008 bytes used

[root@devel3 root]# ./diskfree.pl /boot
The /boot device is /dev/sda1
It has 31190016 bytes available
It has 47755264 bytes total
It has 14099456 bytes used

[root@devel3 root]# ./diskfree.pl /dev/sda1
The /dev/sda1 device is /dev/sda1
It has 31190016 bytes available
It has 47755264 bytes total
It has 14099456 bytes used
[root@devel3 root]#
[download]

cheers

tachyon