sequential file handling

[airblaine]

Code help please, oh great ones! Scenerio: when a file shows up in /dir/main, it needs to move to /dir1 the next file that shows up needs to go to /dir2 and the next, to /dir3 (now for where I'm stuck on the array/shift/push thing) the next file needs to go to /dir1 etc,so basically a round robbin of file distribution. Seems simple, but I'm just not getting it! Thanks in advance!

[maverick]

Here's how to do just the 'round robin' part.

my @dirs = qw{ dir1 dir2 dir3 };
my $num_targets = $#dirs + 1;

my $counter = 0;
foreach (0..10) {
        my $target = $dirs[$counter % $num_targets];

        print "$_ => $target\n";

        $counter++;
}

The % operator gives you the remainder of the division of $counter / $num_targets, which will be 0, 1 or 2 for any value of $counter. Use that number to select the proper directory out of the array.

Run this little snippet and you can see the result...

/\/\averick
OmG! They killed tilly! You *bleep*!!

[DamnDirtyApe]

...and as for the file moving part, you might have a look at File::Copy or Meta::Utils::File::Move on CPAN.
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[wageslave]

or something like this should works

use strict;
my @dir = qw{ dir1 dir2 dir3 };
my $target=shift(@dir);
push(@dir,$target);
print "$target\n";

plus your file copy

[airblaine]

Sorry, I didn't mention that this will have to be run from cron or timed every 5 minutes. That's the tricky part. So it will have to distribute the file from /main to /dir1 then 5 minutes later, /main to /dir2 etc. Should it be done by writing to and from a text file? I'm stumped. Thanks -Blaine