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Mastering Modern Perl: Writing Efficient and Maintainable Code

Directories and Paths

Explore how to efficiently manage directories and file paths in Perl, including opening and reading directories, handling relative and absolute paths, and using modules like File::Spec and Path::Class for portable filesystem manipulation.

We'll cover the following...

Manipulating directories

Working with directories is similar to working with files, except that we can’t write to directories.

Open a directory

Open a directory handle with the opendir built-in:

opendir my $dirh, '/home/monkeytamer/tasks/';

Read from a directory

The readdir built-in reads from a directory. As with readline, you may iterate over the contents of directories one entry at a time or you may assign everything to an array in one swoop:

Perl
# iteration
while (my $file = readdir $dirh) {
   ...
}
 
# flatten into a list, assign to array
my @files = readdir $otherdirh;

In a while loop, readdir sets $_: ...