Newbie Question -- Changing File Path?

[KStowe]

Hi Monks, thanks for the help last time I posted...sorry about that double post thing, I got a bit confused, but all is well after reading the FAQ.

Anyway, I would like to delete files from a filelist specified by a user (easily accomplished with the unlink function) but I would also like to let the user specify which directory the files need to be removed from? How can the unlink function be modified to allow for a path variable? After the filelist is in an array I tried:

unlink($path <@arr>);

How can I get this right? Any suggestions and ideas would be appreciated. Thanks a million. --KStowe

[azatoth]

TIMTOWTDI!

Use Getopt::Long to get the user to enter command line options, i.e. the path.

use Getopt::Long;

my %opt = ();
            GetOptions(
               \%opt,
               #general file path
               "path=s",
                        #file name
                 "file=s",
              );
my $path = $opt{path};
my $file = $opt{file};

Then, use concatenation to join the $path with the file name!

my $fullFile = $path . $file;
unlink($fullFile) or die "$!\n";



Or if we're dealing with an array of files in the same dir :



foreach my $arrayFile(@array) {
  my $fullFile = $path . $arrayFile;
  unlink($fullFile) or die "$!\n";
  }



HTH

Azatoth a.k.a Captain Whiplash

Make Your Die Messages Full of Wisdom!
Get YOUR PerlMonks Stagename here!
Want to speak like a Londoner?

[bwana147]

If I get it right, you've got the path in $path and a list of mere filenames in @arr, each of which must be prepended with $path to get a list of full paths. I'd use map:

unlink map { "$path/$_" } @arr;

You should definitely test the return value of unlink: If anything goes wrong, it won't complain loudly but merely return a false value

--bwana147

[mikfire]

What about something simple? Simply tell the user that if the first command line arguement is a directory, all the listed files will be assumed to be in that directory.

You could do something like this:

my @arr;
if ( -d $ARGV[0] ) {
  my $dir = shift @ARGV;
  @arr = map { "$dir/$_" } @ARGV;
}
else {
  @arr = @ARGV;
}

I would also warn you against using unlink the way you are. Very, very, very bad things can happen if you unlink a directory that has files in it. I would prefer to loop through the array and do them one-by-one:

for ( @arr ) {
  if ( -d $_ ) {
    print "nice try - I cannot unlink directories\n";
    next;
  }
  unlink $_;
}

mikfire

[ichimunki]

What kind of bad things happen if I delete a directory with files in it? I'd normally just test it, but now I'm afraid. And if it's a potentially serious issue, why does Perl let you do it? Even the shell command doesn't let you delete a non-empty directory...

[mikfire]

Hmmm, I decided to read the docs just to make sure I knew what I was talking about. And unlink will not touch a directory unless you are root and running with the -U flag. So, it would appear that you can ignore my warning and I really didn't know what I was talking about :)

mikfire

[Anonymous Monk]

I do this in a program I wrote to get rid of unwanted files in the windows environment. When the user enters the path name append the file name on to the end of it, so instead of having file1.txt

$array[0] = C:/MainDir/SubDir/ExtraDir/file1.txt

When the array is all filled up with your unwanted files you just say:

$i = $#array;
for ($i;$i >= 0;$i--){
unlink $array[$i];
}

or this works just as well

while (@array) {
$x = (pop, @array);
unlink $x;
}