batcater98 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I will start by stating I am working in a Windows system running ActiveState Perl. Issue - I am trying to create a script that will travers multiple sub-directories under a static "Root" directory and look for files ending in .DAT that were modified/created on todays date. I have been able to do all but figure out how to traverse sub-dirs and only look for the .DAT files. My code so far is below - can anyone lend a hand in showing me if there is a way to traverse all subs from a given root and look for just files ending in .dat? 
#!/usr/local/bin/perl

opendir(DIR, $some_dir) || die "can't opendir $some_dir: $!";
@files = readdir(DIR)
closedir DIR;

foreach $file (@files)
{
  ($dev,$ino,$mode,$nlink,$uid,$gid,$rdev,$size,
   $atime,$mtime,$ctime,$blksize,$blocks)
   = stat($file);


  # Will use data to create SQL statements to input data into Database
}

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Thanks, Ad.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Help with ReadDir and Stat?
by moritz (Cardinal) on Mar 13, 2008 at 14:49 UTC
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Re: Help with ReadDir and Stat?
by Akoya (Scribe) on Mar 13, 2008 at 15:59 UTC
    For a quick solution, without having to rely on (the far superior) modules, I've often used this code (which could certainly be improved). Just pass the starting directory on the command line. 
    #!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

open my $LOG, '>', "$0.log";

my $startdir = $ARGV[0] || '.';
push my @dirs, $startdir;
while (my $dir = pop @dirs) {
    opendir DIR, $dir; 
    my @files = grep !/^\.\.?$/, readdir DIR;
    closedir DIR;
    foreach my $file (@files) {
        my $fullname = "$dir/$file";
        $fullname = $file if ( $dir eq "/" );
        if ( -d $fullname ) {
            push @dirs, $fullname;
            next;
        }
        if ( -f $fullname ) {
            if ( $file =~ /\.dat$/i ) {
                print $LOG $fullname . "\n";
            }
        }
    }
}
close $LOG;

    [download]
    You will of course have to add the logic for checking the tile modification time. A shortcut for that is: 
    my $mtime = stat($file)[9];

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    Unless, of course you need the other values that stat returns.
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      Thanks, this is a huge help - in relation to the "Date" comparison - get the mod time back using the stat and that works great, but how would I do the comparison to if the file was modified or created on "Today's" date? I.E. if the file was created/modified today I want to keeps it's info - if not I will move on? Having troubles figuring out how to get to teh "Day" comparison. Thanks Again, Ad.
[reply]
        You can pass the mtime to localtime. i.e., 
        my ($mday, $mon, $year) = localtime($mtime)[3,4,5];

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        Then do the same with the current time: 
        my ($cmday, $cmon, $cyear) = localtime(time)[3,4,5];

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        and then compare them. I'm sure there's a more efficient way, but this should work.
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