Re: Newbie Question -- Changing File Path?

[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