Checking for the availability of network drive

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

I have a Perl program that regularly checks for the presence of a new file in a directory held on a network drive. This program works well until the network drive is temporally unavailable. I would like a method that will somehow check to see if the network drive is available first and then check for the file. I want the program to continue running without throwing up an error message. It has been suggested that I look up the following: IO::Socket's is_connected and IO::Select's can_read, can_write, and has_exception


while(1) { 
  #  Check for presence of file here
  sleep 5;
}
[download]

Enlightenment welcomed.

Comment on Checking for the availability of network drive Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Checking for the availability of network drive by Anonymous Monk on Mar 06, 2009 at 11:03 UTC
How does your program check? Did you look up IO::Socket ...? What is a "Network drive"? Do these help Connecting to network shared drive, Checking status of Network Mapped Drives?	[reply]
Re: Checking for the availability of network drive by ig (Vicar) on Mar 06, 2009 at 12:31 UTC
Would it be sufficient to check that the directory exists? `while(1) { if( -d $directory) { # Check for presence of file here } sleep 5; }` [download] Whatever test you do before you check for a new file, there is the possibility that access to the network drive is lost after you confirm that it is available but before you check for the new file, so your check for the new file should be written to handle the errors that might result. If it is, there may not be much advantage in checking that the network drive is available first.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Checking for the availability of network drive by Bloodnok (Vicar) on Mar 06, 2009 at 13:00 UTC
I infer from the use of ...network drive that the context is Windoze - in which case I vaguely remember that the `net` command can be used to ascertain the availability of a network drive (see Re: Checking status of Network Mapped Drives). A user level that continues to overstate my experience :-))	[reply] [d/l]