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

Ok, I have a bunch of files. All of these files have the same name. All of these files with the same name are in a directory with the same name. Each of these directories with the same name is a subdirectory in a bunch of directories all with different names. All of these directories are subdirectories of one common directory. So the list of files would look like this:

./dir1/foo/bar.txt

./dir2/foo/bar.txt

./dir3/foo/bar.txt

etc.

I need to make the same modification to every copy of bar.txt. My plan was to find a way to make an array dirList such that its contents were equal to ( dir1 dir2 dir3 ... ). Therefore I could just say 

foreach my $dir ( @dirList ) {
  open ( FILE, "$dir/foo/bar.txt" ) or die ("nasty message: $!");
  while (<FILE>) {
    &doStuff();
  }
}

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My only problem is I don't know how to create @dirList. Any help would be appreciated.

Some people drink from the fountain of knowledge, others just gargle.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Opening every directory in the current directory
by japhy (Canon) on Feb 10, 2001 at 02:39 UTC
    You want to get a list of the entries in a given directory that are also directories. This is done with readdir() and the -d test: 
    opendir DIR, $some_directory or
  die "can't read $some_directory: $!";
@dirList = grep -d "$some_directory/$_", readdir DIR;
closedir DIR;

    [download]
    Please read the appropriate documentation (perlfunc).

    japhy -- Perl and Regex Hacker
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[d/l]
      You may as well get a list of the just the directories with the desired file, or else the open() in the original post's code will fail:
      @DirList = grep {
 -f "$some_directory/$_/foo/bar.txt"
} readdir DIR;

      [download]
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[d/l]
Re: Opening every directory in the current directory
by runrig (Abbot) on Feb 10, 2001 at 02:42 UTC
    You could build an array with File::Find, but a simpler way would be to use file globbing to just get the file names directly:
    
while (my $file=<*/foo/bar.txt>) {
 #Open/read $file and do Stuff
}

    [download]
[reply]
[d/l]
Re: Opening every directory in the current directory
by footpad (Abbot) on Feb 10, 2001 at 08:28 UTC
[reply]

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