asked on

Listing a directory with spaces in perl

here is my situation...

I have a music folder with thousands of artists, the directory structure is as follows:
artist name > Album name > Songs

example: [savona@bighat scripts]$ ls /home/savona/drobo/Music/The\ Beatles/
The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night The Beatles - Revolver
The Beatles - Help The Beatles - Rubber Soul
The Beatles - Let It Be The Beatles - Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour

As a learning experience (just starting with perl) I wanted to make a perl script that will make me a nice clean music list text file. Something that would end up looking like this:

The Beatles
The Beatles - A Hard Day's Night
The Beatles - Help
The Beatles - Let It Be
The Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour
The Beatles - Revolver
The Beatles - Rubber Soul
The Beatles - Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band

So I have been sitting here hacking away at it but I am at a lost here. How am I going to list the directories out if they have spaces in them? I tried multiple ways, globbing, splitting, escaping (i.e. \\\)... I know it is something so simple I am missing.

Here is the code I have so far... some things may be commented out since I was trying a bunch of different things. Any help would be appreciated.

#!/usr/bin/perl
# Set some variables
$musicdir="/home/savona/drobo/Music/";
# Get long listing of Music directory and awk out artist names and make temp files
system("ls -l $musicdir > /tmp/musiclist");
system("`awk '{print \$8,\$9,\$10,\$11,\$12,\$13,\$14,\$15,\$16}' /tmp/musiclist > /tmp/musiclist2`");
system("rm -f /tmp/musiclist");
system("`awk '{print \$1,\$2,\$3,\$4,\$5,\$6,\$7}' /tmp/musiclist2 > /tmp/musiclist3`");
# open temp file for reading
open (MUSICLIST, '/tmp/musiclist2');
while (<MUSICLIST>) {
        chomp($name);
#       @n = split / /;
#       $fullname = `echo "@n[0]" "@n[1]" "@n[2]" "@n[3]" "@n[4]" "@n[5]" "@n[6]" "@n[7]"`;
#       system("ls -l $musicdir$fullname >> /home/savona/musiclist.txt");
#
print "$name";
}

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ghostdog74

if you want to use Perl, then use Perl. There's no need to use awk or any shell tools (for what you want).

use File::Basename;
my $music = "/home/savona/drobo/Music/The Beatles";
chdir($music);
my $artistname = basename($music);
print $artistname."\n";
while ( <*>){
 print "\t".$_."\n"; 
}

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ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

oleber

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vikaskhoria

You can also use this code snippet to list all the files in a drectory.
Do let me know i you need any more help on this.

$direct=<Directory Path>;
opendir(DIR,$direct);
print readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);

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Steven Vona

ASKER

Thanks, this code does exactly what I wanted it to. Is it possible you can take a second and explain what the code is doing? How did you get around the spaces in the directory names?

Thanks!

Steven Vona

ASKER

Oleber, how would I print the output to a file?

oleber

as usual, redirect the output

perl script.pl > my_file.txt