Using Perl to rename files in a directory

Question

I\'d like to take a directory and for all email (*.msg) files, remove the \'RE \' at the beginning. I have the following code but the rename fails.

opendir(D         


        

Answer 1

As already mentioned, your script fails because of the path you expect and the script uses are not the same.

I would suggest a more transparent usage. Hardcoding a directory is not a good idea, IMO. As I learned one day when I made a script to alter some original files, with the hardcoded path, and a colleague of mine thought this would be a nice script to borrow to alter his copies. Ooops!

Usage:

perl script.pl "^RE " *.msg

i.e. regex, then a file glob list, where the path is denoted in relation to the script, e.g. *.msg, emails/*.msg or even /home/pat/emails/*.msg /home/foo/*.msg. (multiple globs possible)

Using the absolute paths will leave the user with no doubt as to which files he'll be affecting, and it will also make the script reusable.

Code:

use strict;
use warnings;
use v5.10;
use File::Copy qw(move);

my $rx = shift;   # e.g. "^RE "

if ($ENV{OS} =~ /^Windows/) {  # Patch for Windows' lack of shell globbing
    @ARGV = map glob, @ARGV;
}

for (@ARGV) {
    if (/$rx/) {
        my $new = s/$rx//r;  # Using non-destructive substitution
        say "Moving $_ to $new ...";
        move($_, $new) or die $!;
    }
}