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

I'm a perl noob
I'm trying to inventory a bunch of file with .wgt extension and store the matches (from some seeded input) in a report at the end. I need the full path that Find::File::name provides.
To that end, I'd like to be able to store the output of Find::File::name into a local variable so I can eventually do append the string to a file.
It seems that I should be able to do this: 
my $var = $Find::File::name;

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but lo, it does not work.
but...I'm confused because I can send it to std out by using print so it seems to reason that it's returning a string.
print $Find::File::name;

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Here is my attempted implementation of Wanted.
sub Wanted
{
   return unless (-f $_);
   # only operate on compiled widgets
    /\.wgt$/ or return;

    my $file = $_;

    chomp ($file);
    chomp ($line);
    #print $file ." \n" if $file eq $line;
    if (lc($line) eq lc($file)){
        print  $File::Find::name. "\n";
        #my $foundFile = $File::Find::name. "\n"; #this does not work 
+hence it is commented out!!
    }
    return;

}

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Any takers?
Thanks in advance.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Help using Find::File::name
by stefbv (Priest) on Nov 28, 2010 at 10:35 UTC

    Your question has been answered, this is my answer to the question you didn't (directly) ask, how can I easily find all (nonempty) files with a '.wgt' extension in a specified path.

    use strict;
use warnings;

use File::Find::Rule;

my $search_path = '.';

my @files = File::Find::Rule
    ->name('*.wgt')
    ->file
    ->nonempty
    ->in($search_path);

foreach my $file (@files) {
    # do something with '$file'
}

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    The downside is that File::Find::Rule is not a core module yet, but my opinion is that it should be. Anyway the great power of Perl stands in the huge library of modules on CPAN.

    Regards, Stefan

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Re: Help using Find::File::name
by pobocks (Chaplain) on Nov 28, 2010 at 07:39 UTC

    It's almost certainly a scoping problem, as others have said.

    Additionally, I'm not sure what you're trying to do in this Wanted. Even if you had proper scoping, you'd still be re-assigning the variable each time you went over it - in the end, you'd just have whatever the last value that matched the test.

    Here's a try at something more reasonable:

    my @foundfiles;
sub Wanted {
   return unless (-f $_);
   # only operate on compiled widgets
    /\.wgt$/ or return;

    my $file = $_;

    chomp ($file);
    chomp ($line);
    #print $file ." \n" if $file eq $line;
    if (lc($line) eq lc($file)){
        # Adds the files to the array
        push @foundFiles, $File::Find::name;
    }
    return;
}

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    Alternately, you could keep foundfile as a scalar, and append to it thusly:

    $foundfile .= "$File::Find::name\n";

    Either way, the important thing is that your variable needs to be in a scope where it won't go away before you use it.

    These are pretty common errors, and Perl can catch a lot of them. If you aren't already, start putting this code at the top of every Perl program you write:

    use strict;
use warnings;

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    This will catch a LOT of problems before they turn into headaches. For even more detail (at some performance cost, you can use diagnostics;

    for(split(" ","tsuJ rehtonA lreP rekcaH")){print reverse . " "}print "\b.\n";
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Re: Help using Find::File::name
by 7stud (Deacon) on Nov 27, 2010 at 23:29 UTC
    Spelling counts; it's $File::Find::name, and you can certainly assign the string to a variable--afterall $File::Find::name is just the name of a scalar variable itself (see the $ sign?). If you declare a variable in your program, like $full_path, the variable's real name is $main::full_path. So there is nothing special about $File::Find::name--it's just a regular ole variable, albeit it's declared in another file. When you write: use File::Find you are telling perl to look for a directory called File, which contains a file named Find. Inside the file Find.pm, you will find the declaration of the variable $name.
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Re: Help using Find::File::name
by Anonymous Monk on Nov 27, 2010 at 23:32 UTC
    Where do you want to use the variable $foundFile? Outside of the if-block? If so, you have a scoping problem, i.e. $foundFile will be out of scope and gone after the closing '}' of the if-block.

    Maybe you want to store the find results in some global variable (array), or some such...

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