in reply to aborting File::Find::find

Perhaps the easiest way is to die, and wrap the find call with eval. 

eval {
  find( sub { ...; --$fnlinks or die; }, $dir );
};

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Update: Another goto-like solution, if you don't like the idea of generating an exception: 

UNLINKS: {
  find( sub { ...; --$fnlinks or last UNLINKS; }, $dir );
}

[download]

We're building the house of the future together.

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Re^2: aborting File::Find::find
by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Nov 16, 2006 at 18:42 UTC
    jdporter,
    If you want scary action at a distance that is subject to break if the implementation changes: 
    find(sub { ...; --$fnlinks or last Proc_Top_Item; }, $dir);

    [download]
    I found this by looking under the File::Find covers.

    Now that I think about it, this sounds like the sanest solution. Of course I mean a patch to File::Find where you can either set some flag or pass in a closure that evaluates to true to determine if it can terminate early which is checked each loop.

    Cheers - L~R

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Re^2: aborting File::Find::find
by Fletch (Bishop) on Nov 16, 2006 at 18:27 UTC

    You probably would want to die with a specific string (maybe "FOUND_ALL_LINKS") and check $@ after the eval to make sure that you really exited because you hit your link limit rather than something else going wrong and dieing.

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Re^2: aborting File::Find::find
by marvell (Pilgrim) on Nov 16, 2006 at 18:16 UTC
    It's certainly more efficient, but not exactly Mr Elegant. Nor is a goto. However, it is still top of the lsit of solutions. Thanks.

    --
    Steve Marvell

[reply]
      One way to make the eval/die a little more elegant is to use the Error module and have 'real' exceptions: 
      #!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use Error qw/:try/;
use File::Find;

{
    package Exception::FoundFile;
    use base qw/Error/;
    sub new {
        my $s = bless {}, __PACKAGE__;
        $s->{_file} = shift;
        return $s;
    }
    sub file { return shift->{_file}; }
}

try {
    find(sub {
            my $file = $File::Find::name;
            # Show our working, so you can see we stop early
            print "Examining $file\n";
            throw Exception::FoundFile->new($file)
                if ($file =~ /f/); # Or whatever your condition is
            },
            ".");
}
catch Exception::FoundFile with {
    my $e = shift;
    print "Found file: ", $e->file, "\n";
}
otherwise {
    print "Didn't find a file\n";
};

      [download]
      But the 'real solution' would be for the File::Find interface to respect a return value from the sub as to whether it should continue or not.

      Too late for that now, sadly.

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