in reply to What is the best way to move a directory?

It's the same as for files. The underlying system call on unix is rename, and you will probably have success with calling the perl function of the same name. perldoc -f rename

If you look at perldoc perlport and search for rename, you'll see that it works on Win32 too, but can't move between different logical volumes. I guess that means drive letters, but I don't really know. I would have thought the same limitation applied to Unix, to be honest.

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Re^2: What is the best way to move a directory?
by Fletch (Bishop) on Nov 28, 2006 at 18:09 UTC

    The rename system call (upon which the Perl rename is built) cannot rename files across different devices (i.e. across mount points, say from /home/foo/bar to /nfsmount/baz). See File::Copy and its move routine.

[reply]

      Thanks! The fact that File::Copy is one of the standard (already installed) Perl modules is a plus.

      ----------------------------
use File::Copy;

my $source_dir = '/home/my/this_dir';
my $destination_dir = '/usr/local/elsewhere/this_dir';

move("$source_dir", "$destination_dir");
----------------------------

      [download]

      And I think this

      ----------------------------
use File::Copy;
use Carp qw(croak);

move_reliable("$source_dir", "$destination_dir");

sub move_reliable {
    my ( $source, $destination ) = @_;
    my $source_size = (-s $source) || 0;

    move( $source, $destination )
        || croak("move_reliable($source, $destination) failed: $!");
    my $destination_size = (-s $destination) || 0;
    croak(
        "move_reliable($source, $destination) failed copied $destination_size bytes out of $source_size"
        )
        if ( $source_size != $destination_size );
    1;
}
----------------------------

      from Leon Brocard's File::Copy::Reliable is also nice.

[reply]
[d/l]

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