Code for DELETING NT FILES

[rauschy33]

thank you for those who responded; Here is the code that I have been working with:

$dir= shift || '.';

opendir DIR, $dir or die "Can't open directory $dir: $!\n";

while ($file= readdir DIR ) {   
    next if $file !~/^\w{10,}\d{4,}\.\d{1,}/;
    print "Found a file: $file\n" if $file=~/^\w{10,}\d{4,}\.\d{1,}/;
     
    }
    print "are you sure that you want to delete $file   'Y/y(es)'  ";
    chop ($answer = <STDIN>);    

unlink $file or die "Can't delete $file: $!\n" if $answer =~m%^Y(es)?$
+%i;

[buzzcutbuddha]

C:\>perl -w rauschcode.pl C:\WINNT\temp
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at rauschcode.pl line 
+10.
are you sure that you want to delete    'Y/y(es)'  y
Use of uninitialized value in unlink at rauschcode.pl line 13, <STDIN>
+ line 1.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) at rauschcode.pl line 
+13, <STDIN> line 1.
Can't delete : Bad file descriptor

Perhaps you should use File::Find instead. It doesn't look you are capturing the File's name....



use File::Find;

find(\&wanted, (shift || '.'));
sub wanted 
{
    my $filename = $File::Find::name;
    print "Delete $filename? (Y/n)";
    my $answer = (<STDIN>);
    unlink $filename if $answer =~m%^Y(es)?$%i;
}

Of course, this could be made much better by adding some error checking, etc, but this seems to work just fine! :) HTH.

[autark]

Well, as far as I can tell, you ask the user about the file _outside_ of the while-loop, and you don't take into consideration that $dir might be something else than '.'
This is how I would have written it (more or less):

my $dir = shift || '.';

opendir DIR, $dir or die "Can't open directory $dir: $!\n";
while (defined (my $file = readdir DIR) ) {
      next if $file !~ /^\w{10,}\d{4,}\.\d{1,}/;
      print "Found a file: $file\n";

      print "are you sure that you want to delete $file   'Y/y(es)'  "
+;
      chomp( my $answer=<STDIN> );
      do { unlink "$dir/$file" or die "Can't delete $file: $!\n" }
         if $answer =~ m%^Y(es)?$%i;
}

You might have to use the 'while( defined (...) )'-construct if you are using an older perl.

Autark.

[tye]

If $dir isn't ".", then this won't work. unlink($file) tries to delete $file from your current directory, not from whatever $dir is.

unlink("$dir/$file");

If you want to port to platforms that don't use "/" as the direcotry separator, I suggest lookin at how MakeMaker handles this.