captain.moor has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi there, I have around 50,000 or so word documents and I would like to write a script to sort these files by author. The author is held as a extended file attribute and so far I have not been able to find a way to access this data. I have tried using the following Win32::OLE script to extract these values. However under Windows 7 this does not return the correct information. I am unsure wither this is because Windows 7 has changed the file attribute structure, or because this method does not allow me access to this data. 
my $directory = $ARGV[0] || die "$pname requires directory as first ar
+gument\n"; 

find(\&main2, $directory);

sub main2{
    if(-f $File::Find::name){
        if(extention($File::Find::name) eq '.pdf'){
            #print "File: $_ Extention: " . extention($_) . "\n";
            my $shell  = Win32::OLE->new("Shell.Application") or die;
            my $folder = $shell->NameSpace("$File::Find::dir") or die;
            my $file   = $folder->ParseName("$_") or die;
            for my $i (0..50){
                my $attrib = $folder->GetDetailsOf($file, $i);
                print "$i) $_ >> $attrib\n" if ! $attrib eq '';
            }
            print "-------------------------------------------\n";
        }
    }
}

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I want to be able to access this value on pdf, doc & excel files types so if you could point me in the direction of a module or thread on how I can achieve this I would be forever grateful. Thanks and looking forward to your response. Tim

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Word Document Accessing Extended Attributes - Author
by keszler (Priest) on Oct 31, 2009 at 12:39 UTC
    It appears to be a change in Windows 7. The following worked on XP64. 
    G:\>type x.pl
use Win32::OLE;
my $shell  = Win32::OLE->new("Shell.Application") or die;
my $folder = $shell->NameSpace("G:\\") or die;
my $file   = $folder->ParseName("X.doc") or die;
for my $i (0..50){
        my $attrib = $folder->GetDetailsOf($file, $i);
        print "$i) $_ >> $attrib\n" if ! $attrib eq '';
}
print "-------------------------------------------\n";


G:\>x.pl
0)  >> X.doc
1)  >> 267 KB
2)  >> Microsoft Word Document
3)  >> 10/31/2009 8:13 AM
4)  >> 10/31/2009 8:12 AM
5)  >> 10/31/2009 12:00 AM
6)  >> A
7)  >> Online
8)  >> Everyone
9)  >> Scott R. Keszler
10)  >> Test Document
13)  >> 8
31)  >> 8/3/2009 1:13 PM
-------------------------------------------

    [download]
    OLE::Storage might work on Win7: 
    G:\>ppm install ole-storage
G:\>ppm install unicode-map
G:\>ppm install startup
G:\>which ldat
C:\Perl64\site\bin/ldat

G:\>ldat X.doc
Processing "X.doc"
# Microsoft Office Word Document (Word.Document.8, 31.10.2009, 12:13:0
+5, rev 10 )
  Title: Test Document
  Authress: Scott R. Keszler
  Organization: SRK Consulting
  Application: Microsoft Office Word
  Template: Normal.dot
  Created: 03.08.2009, 17:13:00
  Last saved: 31.10.2009, 12:13:00
Done.

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