in reply to Re^2: Case of autovivification
in thread Case of autovivification

Try running your script with some extra print statements and you can see what it is doing as it progresses. I expect the data structure it is building is not what you want and may help explain why you are using so much memory.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;


my %filesystem;
my $ref = $filesystem{root} ||= {};


traverse(".","");

sub traverse{
        my ($folder,@path) = @_;
        print "traverse called for $folder, @path\n";
        opendir DIR,$folder;
        my @list = grep {!/^\.{1,2}$/} readdir DIR; # exclude . and ..
        closedir DIR;
        foreach my $entry(@list){
                print "processing $entry\n";
                print "%filesystem (" . \%filesystem . ") contains:\n"
+ . Dumper(\%filesystem);
                print "\$ref ($ref) is pointing to:\n" . Dumper($ref);
                sleep(1);
                next if ( -l $folder."/". $entry); # skip links
                                $ref = $$ref{$_} ||= {} for @path;
                if( -d $folder."/". $entry){
                    traverse($folder."/".$entry,@path,$entry);
                }else{
                    $$ref{$folder} = $entry;
                };
        };
};


print Dumper(\%filesystem);

[download]

You should think carefully about the line $ref = $$ref{$_} ||= {} for @path; in your subroutine.

Also, your subroutine is recursive. It keeps changing the global variable $ref. Think about what $ref is referencing and how this changes as your program progresses.

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom