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

Hello all, I found a code snippet within a script and do not know, what it means. I know some basics of perl but I am not really familar with this. Nevertheless I would like to know what this will mean: 
unlink $file if /.BGV/;

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I know that I will delete the file, but what does this 'if' means? What condition is it? CU

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Re: Do not understand code
by haukex (Archbishop) on Sep 28, 2017 at 10:03 UTC
    unlink $file if /.BGV/; ... what does this 'if' means? What condition is it?

    The if after a statement is a statement modifier, it is the equivalent of if (/.BGV/) { unlink $file }. The condition is equivalent to $_ =~ /.BGV/, that is, match the special variable $_ against the regex /.BGV/. The special variable $_ gets set in several places, one very common one is the while (<$filehandle>) { ... } loop, see I/O Operators. That line of code in English: If the string stored in $_ contains the four-character sequence of any character (except newline) followed by the string 'BGV', then unlink (delete) the file whose name is given in the string $file.

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      Thanks for this detailed answer. I knew its possible to ask for a condition like $_ ~= <regex> - but this notation is new for me. With this information I understand this snippet.
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        Note that you reversed the operator. It’s not ~=, it’s =~.

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Re: Do not understand code
by LanX (Saint) on Sep 28, 2017 at 10:05 UTC
    > What condition is it?

    It is a regex testing the content of $_

    And it looks broken, probably someone thought to only match files which ends on .BGV but it's matching any substring with 4 characters where the last 3 are BGV

    Cheers Rolf
    (addicted to the Perl Programming Language and ☆☆☆☆ :)
    Je suis Charlie!

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      Ah, yes, I understand... :-) Thats quite easy. Thanks a lot for this answer...
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Re: Do not understand code
by 1nickt (Canon) on Sep 28, 2017 at 10:06 UTC

    Hi, this is shorthand for 

    unlink $file if $_ =~ m/.BGV/;

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    The way forward always starts with a minimal test.
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      To see it in a long term, its more easy to understand the code. Thanks for this info.
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Re: Do not understand code
by ForgotPasswordAgain (Vicar) on Sep 29, 2017 at 15:04 UTC
    I don't see it mentioned, so thought I'd point out that /.BGV/ might be buggy for two reasons:
    1. Since . matches any character, /.BGV/ would match for example "foo-BGV".
    2. There's no anchor at the end, so it would match anywhere in the filename, for example "foo-BGV.txt".
    It's possible that that's what was intended, but it likely should be /\.BGV\z/ if it's meant to be a file suffix, and maybe even /\.bgv\z/i if it isn't case-sensitive.
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