in reply to Whoops! I deleted everything!

What am I missing?

A bunch of data apparently... (I couldn't resist.)

I know you don't want to hear this now, but you should never run (even as a test) code like this without neutering it first. Don't unlink anything but have it write the names of the files it would have unlinked to a file for inspection. Only after you are sure that it won't do anything harmful, run it on a test directory. Triple check it before you run it in a production environment.

The problem is with your $days variable. You declared it with my() twice. Apparently, that results in some freakish behavior. During the first call to File::Find::find, $days is undefined. It is properly set to 7 during the second call.

Using warnings would have helped you spot this bug early.

By the way, if ($#deletions == 0 ) is not what you mean. That will be true if @deletions has a single element as the index of that element will indeed be zero. You mean if (@deletions == 0) which will be true if @deletions has no elements.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

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Re: Re: Whoops! I deleted everything!
by Anonymous Monk on Dec 11, 2002 at 02:15 UTC
    Thanks for your insight. I was too confident about my code, so I let it run. Big mistake. I will always use warnings and do more testing in the future.

    The problem is with your $days variable. You declared it with my() twice. Apparently, that results in some freakish behavior.

    Is it really a bug? It just seems like it should work. Would it have worked properly if I hadn't used my() and just made $days global? What would be the best solution?

[reply]

      Well, when you declare it twice, the first declaration overides the second and it is like the first one didn't exist at all. You could comment out the my $days = 31; and your program will behave exactly the same.

      It would have worked if $days was global but I don't think that's the best solution. I think the best solution is simply to remove the 'my' on the line where you set my $days = 7;. So just change that line to $days = 7; and that should do the trick.

      Of course, I still recommend testing thoroughly before actually allowing it to unlink files. ;-)

      -sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";
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