Zero out particular file extentions once found

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

Here it goes!! I am using File::find to search a directory that is several hundred folders deep with about 75 million files (I know, it was painful when I first looked at it as well)

I want to search out all of the jpgs and replace them with a zero byte file.

Somone recommended I open the jpg and close it right away to zero it out, but I wanted to run it by the group as well.

As always thank you!

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
use File::Find;


find (
        {
                wanted => \&wanted ,
        },
        '/tmp/T1test'
);
        sub wanted
        {
        if( $File::Find::name =~ /\.jpg/i)
                {print "$_\n"}                          
        }
[download]

Comment on Zero out particular file extentions once found Download Code

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Re: Zero out particular file extentions once found by runrig (Abbot) on Mar 05, 2008 at 00:09 UTC
use the truncate function: `# In your wanted sub: return unless -f and /\.jpg$/; truncate $_, 0 or warn "Error truncating $File::Find::name: $!";` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: Zero out particular file extentions once found by trenchwar (Beadle) on Mar 05, 2008 at 17:35 UTC
AWESOME! ++ I did add a /i since people choose to do upper and lower case.	[reply]
Re: Zero out particular file extentions once found by graff (Chancellor) on Mar 05, 2008 at 01:54 UTC
I think you got the answer you asked for, so now I'm just curious: why would you not want to simply delete ("unlink") those files, rather than replacing them with 0-length versions? I would think that anything you could do to bring the file inventory down from 75 million would be a good thing...	[reply]
Re^2: Zero out particular file extentions once found by trenchwar (Beadle) on Mar 05, 2008 at 17:30 UTC
Ok Graff... here goes nothing. Lets say you get into a accident and your insurance adjuster comes out to take pictures of your car (Progressive, State Farm, we deal with all the large ones). The adjuster uses our software to upload the pictures into our systems. When they are uploaded they go into this gigantic file system that no one will let me archive. When uploaded a simultaneous entry goes into a database table. Some customers use an application that looks to the database which points back to this large file system. Other companies do not use the software which requires the db or the files in the FS, so the large jpegs sit there doing nothing. Luckily some customers have given us the go ahead to zero out the jpegs. The name will still exist so the db wont puke, but they don't eat up all the space. Probably more than you wanted to know about a poorly designed work flow that has been in place since I was a toddler.	[reply]
Re^3: Zero out particular file extentions once found by graff (Chancellor) on Mar 05, 2008 at 18:20 UTC
So if the idea is to keep existing functionality "functional", you might consider: rather than having a bunch of zero-length jpeg files (which might create a bad "edge condition" for some applications), you could unlink the existing file and replace it with a symbolic link (same file name) pointing to some known and suitable image (in an ms-windows file system, the term would presumably be "short cut", but it's the thing created by the perl "symlink" function). IOW, instead of having a (few) million distinct jpeg files that you don't need, you have that many symlinks to a single image file. You could even have some fun with that... you know, kittens and/or puppies and/or infants, or maybe a mushroom cloud or one of those "sculptures" consisting of part of a car sticking out of the ground... Something that could give the viewers a chuckle in the context of reviewing a car insurance claim. (Oh wait, do insurance agents have a sense of humor?)	[reply]
Re^4: Zero out particular file extentions once found by trenchwar (Beadle) on Mar 05, 2008 at 18:40 UTC