Fetdching filenames starting numbers.

[Anonymous Monk]

On my Windows 2000 I have a search that gets all files and subdirectories but doesnt get files that start with numbers. I have several files that are numbered such as:
001245AG.ppt
Here is my script:

use strict;
use File::Find;


my $myfile = ">mytext.txt";
open(FILE,"$myfile") || "can not open: $!\n";
my $fil=0;
my $dir=0;


sub search
{
next if(($_ != m/^\.+$/) || ($_ != m/^ws\_ftp/i)); 
    {
    if (!-l && -d)
    { 
        print FILE "\n\nDIRECTORY\t\t$File::Find::name\n";
        print FILE "-----------------------------------------------\n"
+;
        $dir++;
    }
    else
    {
        print FILE "$_\n";
        $fil++;
    }
    
}
}

find(\&search, '/mydirectoryname');
print FILE "\n____________________________________\n";
print FILE "\n\nTotal Directory count = $dir.\n";
print FILE "\nTotal File count = $fil.\n";

close(FILE);

[fruiture]

your search() function is quite broken. Let me rewrite a bit of your code and make comments:

my $myfile = ">mytext.txt";
open(FILE, $myfile ) || "can not open: $!\n";
# please do not quote "$vars"
# $ perldoc -q 'quoting.*vars'
my ($fil,$dir) = (0,0);

sub search {
    return if /^\.+$/ or /^ws_ftp/i;
  # i don#t know what the broken syntax ala
  # ($_ != /../) should mean, but it was nonsense
  # see perlop for '=~' and perlvar for $_

  # the return statement is important
  # exiting from sub via next is bad and you'll get
  # warnings

    if( ! -l and -d _ ){
       # the _ filehandle is described in `perldoc -f stat`
       print FILE "\n\nDIRECTORY\t\t$File::Find::name\n",
         ("-" x 20) , "\n";
       $dir++;
    }
    else {
       print FILE "$_\n";
       $fil++
    }
}

consider reading about perlstyle, perloperators, perlsyntax and control statements, perlsubroutines, and of course on the 'strict' pragma and on the -w switch (perlrun) and the 'warnings' pragma.

--
http://fruiture.de

[Anonymous Monk]

I thank you for giving me much needed answer and more knowledge on Perl. I am not familiar with 'return'. What does it do?

[fruiture]

There's a "return" statement in nearly every procedural programming language supporting subroutines. It causes a subroutine to be stopped and to return a certain value to the caller.

sub foo { return 1 };
$var = foo(); #$var is 1
sub bar {
    print "AAA";
    return 1;
    print "BBB"; #will never happen, for 'return' has
     # stopped this sub
}
$var = bar();

The breaking character of return is not present in all languages, i know ugly Pascal doesn't have a return statement and you cannot exit a sub from the middle.

These are the very basics, try a good book to start!

--
http://fruiture.de

[Anonymous Monk]

Your problem is in the

  next if (($_ != m/^\.+$/) || ($_ != m/^ws\_ftp/i));

line. Get rid of the "$_ !=" in each of them.

The reason for this has to do with Perl numeric conversion of strings. I believe that what it is doing is applying the match, getting back either a 1 (true) or "" (false). The 1 is a one, no problem in converting it there, but the "" converts to 0.

Then when it converts your file name (and it does this due to the !=, a numeric operation) "1234.ppt" it gets back 1234, which will not match either a 1 or a 0. For files that don't start with numbers, you're not having the problem because they're all converting to 0.

I'm a little surprised you haven't gotten any filenames that start with ws_ftp, though. It seems like you should be getting some bad filenames as well as having the others omitted.