Re: switcher

Quick notes:

shift @ARGV is not needed: a simple shift will suffice.
Always check the result of your opendir and bail if it does not work.
Don't shift twice to disgard the "dot directories" from your readdir. Use a simple regex instead: it works very well with grep like so:
```
     @fools = grep { !/^\.\.?$/ } readdir(DIR);
[download]
```
Better yet, as mentioned above, use File::Find

Comment on Re: switcher Download Code

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Re: Re: switcher by $CBAS (Scribe) on Jan 01, 2001 at 17:36 UTC
I know now that using File::Find would be better but I didn't know that when I wrote it so I used the right-tool-for-the-job ;-) I changed the code to check the result of the opendir, would it have caused problems otherwise? Why not shift it twice? Isn't that way faster than a grep? A shift would just ++ the array's base pointer (in C) so it sounds logical to me to use this over grep, right?	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: switcher by repson (Chaplain) on Jan 01, 2001 at 17:58 UTC
Yes, two perlfunc:shifts or a perlfunc:splice would be faster than grep, if you can absolutely always rely on . and .. being the first two items listed in a directory. Which you probably can't even if that is the case on your system. A false return on opendir means that the system had a reason why it couldn't read what was in the directory (probably no read permission for user, you can find out in $!). This means that the call to readdir would fail (I think it would be fatal under warnings and strict) or if the program tried to keep on going `@fools` would be empty, causing other problems.	[reply] [d/l]