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

hello: i was wondering how you could delete files in a directory. i tried the following codes, but none seem to work. got ne ideas why? what am i doing wrong. thanks. 
opendir(ims, "/home/tanglam/www/$Account::cata_acc/_data/messages");
@imss = grep !/\.\.?/, readdir MESSAGE;
closedir(ims);
foreach $imfile (@imss) {
unlink("/home/tanglam/www/$Account::cata_acc/_data/messages/$imfile") 
+|| print "Error deleting message";
}

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this one too
opendir(ims, "/home/tanglam/www/$Account::cata_acc/_data/messages");
@imss = grep !/\.\.?/, readdir MESSAGE;
unlink(@imss);
closedir(ims);

[download]

2001-03-25 Edit by Corion : Closed final CODE tag

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Re: deleting a list of files
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 25, 2001 at 12:42 UTC
    Your grep should have !/^\.\.?$/ rather than !/\.\.?/. Your pattern will match any filename with a dot in it, which results in any file with a dot in its name will not be in @imss, which is probably why your files aren't being deleted. /^\.\.?$/ will match only '.' and '..' which I believe is what you are trying to do.
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        I'm curious: I've always just used /^\.\.$/, assuming that it would be sufficient. Are you recommending /\A\.\.\z/ as a defensive programming practice or are there specific situations you've run into where you needed to do this?

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