asked on

Positioning of paramters gets messed up?

Hi, I'm a newbie to perl scripting and i'm trying to do my a script to transfer all files of a given extension to a given directory by calling
"movedir <directory> <extension>"

This is my complete script:

$dir=shift @ARGV;
$ext=shift @ARGV;
chomp($ext);
chomp($dir);
open (FROM,"ls | grep $ext|");
my @results;
$index=0;
foreach(<FROM>)
{
$results[$index]=$_;
$index++;
}
foreach(@results)
{
system("mv","$_ $dir");
}

--------------------------------------------
the result is an error by the mv command.

to see what "mv" command my script was issueing, i substituted system("mv","$_, $dir") with
print "mv $_ $dir" and the output was strange.
it became "<$dir>mv <$_>"

could anyone explain why the position of the paramters to print got messed up?

PC_User321

$dir=shift @ARGV;
$ext=shift @ARGV;
opendir FROM, "." or die "Could not open $dir: $!";

foreach(readdir FROM)
{
if (/\.$ext$/) {
system("mv","$_ $dir");
}
}

PC_User321

>> could anyone explain why the position of the paramters to print got messed up?
Probably perl had difficulty opening the file called "ls | grep $ext|".

Note the "or die ..." that I used - that is a very useful diagnostic.
Also, run perl with the -w switch to get warnings for things like attempting to read from unopened file handles, as you were attempting to do.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

jmcg

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jmcg

OK, OK, now I tested it. What I gave you should work, but I now like this version even better.

#! /usr/bin/env perl

$dir=shift @ARGV or die "Usage: $0 _dir_ _ext_";
$ext=shift @ARGV or die "Usage: $0 _dir_ _ext_";
opendir FROM, "." or die "Could not open $dir: $!";

foreach (glob "*.$ext") {
rename $_, "$dir/$_";
}

damnedsoul

ASKER

Thank you all for your prompt response!
and also the extra info =)