in reply to Shorter/Better way to rename list of files in a directory

You can reduce the amount of work by restricting the file list to those which actually contain "Closed". Do that by replacing opendir . . . readdir . . . closedir with glob. You can also shorten your loop code a little by taking advantage of $_ and its properties.

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $dir = 'C:\Tickets';

chdir $dir
    or die "Error - Please check that $dir exists and is accessible.\n
+";

my @fileList = glob '*Closed*';

foreach (@fileList) {
    next if -d;
    my $oldname = $_;
    s/Closed/Open/;
    rename $oldname, $_;
}

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I also removed the big if..else by just dieing with the error message if chdir fails. That would avoid closedir on a bad handle in your code. Moving closedir inside the affirmative branch would do that, too.

Update: You can remove the dependence on chdir entirely by including $dir in the glob pattern. With the error handling for rename added, the new version looks like this, 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $dir = 'C:\Tickets\';

my @fileList = glob "${dir}*Closed*";

foreach (@fileList) {
    next if -d;
    my $oldname = $_;
    s/Closed/Open/;
    rename $oldname, $_  or
        $_ = $oldname,
        warn $_, ' not renamed: ', $!;
}

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After Compline,
Zaxo

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Re^2: Shorter/Better way to rename list of files in a directory
by Joost (Canon) on Jun 02, 2006 at 10:14 UTC
[reply]
[d/l]

      Joost++ on checking. That was careless of me. In that case, though, I'd probably just warn so the loop can keep on trying. While I'm at it, why not change $_ back so I still have an accurate file list after I'm done?

          rename $oldname, $_  or
        $_ = $oldname,
        warn "Can't rename $oldname to $_: $!";

      [download]

      After Compline,
      Zaxo

[reply]
[d/l]

      Thanks Joost

      I've been told by some developers to try and not use die in my code if possible. Reasons being that it is not "pretty" and it might complicate debugging sometimes (if not used properly).

      I think one good reason for using it though, like Zaxo stated, is to avoid further bad handles.

[reply]

        There will be times where you may not want the entire program execution to die if you encounter a problem. Instead, it's always a good idea to get into the habit of handling problems gracefully. For example, always test to see if an open or rename fails and then decide what to do at that point. Issuing a die might be an appropriate reaction. Or, depending on the program in question, you might want to log that error information somewhere, retry the action that failed or perform some other function instead of issuing a die.

        You really have to decide on a case by case basis as to what makes the most sense. The main thing to keep in mind is to always check return values and be prepared to handle error conditions.

        -- vek --
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[d/l]
[select]
Re^2: Shorter/Better way to rename list of files in a directory
by Scrat (Monk) on Jun 02, 2006 at 08:43 UTC

    Thanks Zaxo.

    I'm taking notes :-)

[reply]

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