Need help with unlink error

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

Hello Monks, The below program is having an issue with the unlink statement. All other components do what they are supposed to but its giving a 'Use of uninitialized value $_ in unlink (filename)' error for every file I am trying to delete. Purpose of script: collect all the data from .matched files and compile them into one and delete all the .matched files. Would appreciate any help with this. Thanks!

use strict;
use warnings;

my $directory = 'C:\test';
chdir($directory) or die "Can't chdir to $directory $!"; 

opendir(DIR, $directory) || die "Couldn't opendir: $!\n";
my @files = grep(/\.matched$/, readdir(DIR));

my $destdir = 'C:\test';

if (@files) 
{
    foreach(@files){
        print $_, "\n";}
    open COMBINED, '+>>', "$destdir/combined.matched" or die "Can't op
+en file, combined.matched: $!";
    foreach(@files){
        open MATCHED, '<', "$_" or die "Can't open file, $_: $!";
        while(<MATCHED>){
        print COMBINED "$_";}
        close MATCHED;
    }
    close COMBINED;    
}

unlink(@files);
close $directory;

exit 0;
[download]

Comment on Need help with unlink error Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Need help with unlink error by zentara (Cardinal) on Aug 11, 2011 at 16:26 UTC
unlink probably wants full paths to the files. Try this, and see what errors come up `foreach my $file ( @files ) { unlink $file or warn "Could not unlink $file: $!"; }` [download] I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Old Perl Programmer Haiku ................... flash japh	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Need help with unlink error by toolic (Bishop) on Aug 11, 2011 at 16:50 UTC
Try to move your unlink inside your `if (@files) {` block. It seems like, from a logical standpoint, that's where you would want it. Why would you want to call unlink on an empty list?	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Need help with unlink error by jethro (Monsignor) on Aug 11, 2011 at 16:29 UTC
`unlink( map($directory.'\\'.$_, @files) );`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Need help with unlink error by cdarke (Prior) on Aug 12, 2011 at 08:45 UTC
Not you question I know, but: `close $directory;` [download] will fail as well. `$directory` is the name of the directory, not the directory handle. You probably want: `closedir(DIR);` [download] and you could move that earlier in the code, after your readdir.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Need help with unlink error by Anonymous Monk on Aug 11, 2011 at 17:08 UTC
Do you wonder sometimes, why C:\test\combined.matched is no longer there?	[reply]