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Tie::Filesystem - request for review

by erikharrison (Deacon)
on Jun 23, 2004 at 05:02 UTC ( [id://368945]=perlquestion: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??

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

It's been awhile, so pardon if this should go in Meditations.

I've been tinkering around with writing a filemanager in Perl for a while. For implementing basic functionality the abstraction that kept coming to me was to see the filesystem as a hash of hashes and scalars. The following tie is a first cut at that.

package Tie::Filesystem; use warnings; use strict; our $DIR_SEP = '/'; sub TIEHASH { my $class = shift; my $root = shift || '/'; bless {root => $root}, $class; } sub FETCH { my $self = shift; my $leaf = shift; my $pathname = $self->{'root'} . $DIR_SEP . $leaf; return undef unless -e $pathname; if (-d $pathname) { my %dir; tie %dir, 'Tie::Filesystem', $pathname; return \%dir; } return $pathname; #in the future, possibly return something useful } sub EXISTS { my $self = shift; my $leaf = shift; return -e ($self-{'root'} . $DIR_SEP . $leaf); } sub FIRSTKEY { my $self = shift; opendir DIR, $self->{'root'} or return undef; $self->{'dir_handle'} = \*DIR; #This magic allows NEXTKEY to work al +most sanely; return readdir DIR; } sub NEXTKEY { my $self = shift; my $dir = $self->{'dir_handle'}; return undef unless $dir; my $entry = readdir $$dir; closedir $$dir unless $entry; return $entry; } 1;

The first bit of Perl I've written in a long while follows. It passes my preliminary test code, but I'm sure it's full of bugs and gotchas. I'm hoping some of y'all could give it a look, and tell me what you think. Specifically, are there any obvious bugs, and what feature would seem useful extensions of the current behavior?

Cheers,
Erik

Light a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Catch a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchet

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Tie::Filesystem - request for review
by Aragorn (Curate) on Jun 23, 2004 at 07:48 UTC
    To make it nice and portable, consider using File::Spec (or its functional sibling File::Spec::Functions. Using that, you don't have to have the DIR_SEP variable, as you can use catdir. For example:
    my $pathname = $self->{'root'} . $DIR_SEP . $leaf;
    becomes
    my $pathname = catdir($self->{'root'}, $leaf);
    Also
    return -e ($self-{'root'} . $DIR_SEP . $leaf);
    will probably not do what you expect. New testcase ;-)

    Arjen

Re: Tie::Filesystem - request for review
by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Jun 23, 2004 at 06:02 UTC

    On the surface, this looks vaguely similar to Tie::Dir?


    Examine what is said, not who speaks.
    "Efficiency is intelligent laziness." -David Dunham
    "Think for yourself!" - Abigail
    "Memory, processor, disk in that order on the hardware side. Algorithm, algoritm, algorithm on the code side." - tachyon

      Similar. The difference is that Tie::Dir returns a stat for the value of each key. Tie::Filesystem returns another tied hash for directories. I haven't decided what to return in for files yet.

      use Tie::Filesytem; tie %root, Tie::Filesystem; print "Perl Found!" if exists $root{usr}->{bin}{perl};
      Cheers,
      Erik

      Light a man a fire, he's warm for a day. Catch a man on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life. - Terry Pratchet

        You mean like a filehandle or a scalar? I'd like to be able to open a data file with $root->{tmp}->{data.txt}.

        The idea of just reading and writing a file by assigning to a hash is very tempting, although getting a filehandle back might be better if it has to be passed to other functions.

        If you add either, I could see myself using it heavily, not the least because it would allow me to transparently fake a filesystem. VFS perl style. Woo hoo!

        ___________________
        Jeremy
        I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.

        I have some XML data that's hierarcically orgainzed and stored within the filesystem. Each data file is relatively small. Slurping and writing the data back out using a hash assignment would make for a nice interface to my data.

        A feature that allowed me to return a list of files filtered by access or change time would be also be useful.

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