Editing multiple xml files in perl with help of Getopt::Long and Globbing

[chidori]

Hi,

I am using a perl script edit certain xml tags. Previously i was picking up the xml files one by one and running the code. But I thought it would be easy if i can edit all xml files in a single go.

Below is the part of my code

 
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Getopt::Long;
use XML::Twig;
foreach my $xml(@file)
{
$twig->parsefile_inplace($xml);
}
sub getoption{
GetOptions ("file=s" => \$data,) or die("Error in command line argumen
+ts\n");
@file=glob($data); #globbing to pick '*.xml'
}

The code seems to work. But i would like to know if there is a better way to do and also if there is any pitfall the way i do it now.

Script calls

./script -f config.xml
./script -f '*.xml'

[hippo]

Unless you are doing something else with other options to the script which you aren't showing us, I don't see any reason for you to do the globbing in the script. Why not just use the shell's globbing instead? If you invoke the script with:

./script *.xml

and handle this in your code with:

while (my $file = shift @ARGV) {
    next unless -r $file;
    # Process the file here
}

would that not achieve the end result?

[Jim]

Shell globbing isn't universal or portable. So in many cases, it's appropriate to expand globs within the Perl script using File::Glob or other mechanism. For example, in the Microsoft Windows shell (Command Prompt), wildcards are not as powerful or as useful as BSD-style globs; in particular, they can't be used to expand directories (folder), which makes them generally useless for my purposes. I invariably need my Perl scripts to permit their users to glob multiple folder names.

[chidori]

Sorry , didn't mention in my intial post. Yes, i have other options that will get the date and another option to print the xml content. Thats why i didn't do shell globbing.