gitarwmn has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello,

I have a text file containting a list of file names and there directories. I am wondering how to extract just the file names from this list so that I am left with a list of the directories where these files live. Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks

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Re: extracting file names
by ikegami (Patriarch) on Sep 20, 2006 at 00:11 UTC
    File::Basename 
    use File::Basename qw( dirname );

my @path_list = ...;

my %seen;

my @dir_list = sort                    # Sort dirs
               grep { ! $seen{$_}++ }  # Remove dups
               map  { dirname($_) }    # Extract dirs
               @path_list;

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Re: extracting file names
by aufflick (Deacon) on Sep 20, 2006 at 02:25 UTC
    If that's what you want to do, and your platform is Unix (or cygwin) you don't need perl at all. Try this in any bourne-like shell (eg. bash):

    (for f in `cat full_path_list_file`; do dirname $f; done) | sort -u

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    Where full_path_list_file is the name of your file. The sort -u ensures that you get a unique list (ie. duplicates removed).
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