Testing Files and Directories

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

Novice here. I am using an ftp script to get some files from a Unix server. How do I test to see if an item listing is a directory or a file? Here is a snippet of my code where I would need to test the item(given that I have already established a connection to the server and navigated to the correct directory).

@files = $ftp->ls;

foreach $file1 (@files)
{ 
 if($file1 !~ a directory){skip it};
 
 if($file1 !~ a file)
    { $ftp->get($file1) || die "Can't get files from $dir :@{[ $ftp->m
+essage ]}\n";       
    }
   }
$ftp->close();
}
[download]

Comment on Testing Files and Directories Download Code

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Re: Testing Files and Directories by saintmike (Vicar) on Apr 26, 2004 at 17:18 UTC
There's a module on CPAN to help you with this, File::Listing: `foreach my $entry (File::Listing::parse_dir($ftp->dir())) { my($name, $type, $size, $mtime, $mode) = @$entry; next if $type eq 'f'; # plain file # ... do something with directories ... }` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Testing Files and Directories by CountZero (Bishop) on Apr 26, 2004 at 21:47 UTC
Net::FTP::Common seems a good bet. You can get the full dir-listing and if you check the 'perm' key in the hash of each entry, you will see that the first character is either a 'd' for a directory or a '-' for a file. `use Data::Dumper; use Net::FTP::Common; $common_cfg = { Host => 'your.ftp.server', User => 'anonymous', Pass => 'me@here.there', RemoteDir => '/' } ; $ftp = Net::FTP::Common->new($common_cfg, Debug => 0); @dir = $ftp->dir(); print Dumper(\@dir); $ftp->quit;` [download] Warning: Tested on a Windows XP Home Edition system. YMMV on Unix CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Testing Files and Directories by fluxion (Monk) on Apr 26, 2004 at 19:06 UTC
-e will test true if the file exists, and it'll also return false if the target exists, but isnt a file (directory). The same holds true for -d with respect to directories. Using these, your code would be written as follows: `@files = $ftp->ls; foreach $file1 (@files) { next if(-e $file1); # skip non-directories if(-d $file1) { $ftp->get($file1) \|\| die "Can't get files from $dir :@{[ $ftp->message ]}\n"; } } $ftp->close();` [download] Roses are red, violets are blue. All my base, are belong to you.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Re: Testing Files and Directories by Joost (Canon) on Apr 26, 2004 at 19:25 UTC
The `-X` operators will only work with local files. They won't work if you want to know what kind of entry you're looking at before you download it. The OP might be stuck with parsing the output of `dir` as suggested above. "What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Re: Testing Files and Directories by fluxion (Monk) on Apr 26, 2004 at 19:44 UTC
whoops. yah, looks like the best method would be to parse the output of ls -l, as suggested by the first reply. Roses are red, violets are blue. All my base, are belong to you.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Testing Files and Directories by flyingmoose (Priest) on Apr 26, 2004 at 21:32 UTC
Re: Testing Files and Directories by wolfi (Scribe) on Apr 27, 2004 at 06:36 UTC
ignore post, please was going to suggest checking for periods in the files - but realized this wouldn't work	[reply]