What's the best way to recurse through directories in perl? Like, if I have the directory structure:

public_html
----comp
--------linux
--------be
--------windows
----random
--------really_random


Assuming each of those is a directory, and each contains some html files. I can do what I want on 'comp' and 'random', but can't figure out how to get down into their subdirectories(i.e. 'linux', 'really_random'). I'm using code like this:

[snip]
my @files = <*>
while(@files) {
my $file = shift(@files);
if (-d $file) {
chdir($file);
[blablablabla]
[snip]

It could probably be done with some bizarre looking, many-times-nested loop, but is there some easier way (it's perl; their has to be, right?)?

Maybe there's a unix or perl equivalent of the dos 'tree' command. Anybody know about that?

I believe that with some formatting of the output from du, it could suit your purposes...

The File::Find module might help.

Yes yes yes.... but the *REAL* answer to the question is recursion. (Duh to the two responders.) I'm not sure, grandsnafu, if you're not familiar with the concept or if you just aren't familiar with using subroutines in Perl... so I'll just outline the code.

doMyRecursion(".");

sub doMyRecursion {
my $search = $_[0]; # arguments are stored in @_ array.
my @dirs; # 'my' makes it a local variable
# get a list of subdirectories into @dir
foreach $d (@dirs) {
doMyRecursion(the sub dir to search);
}
# perform some operation on the dir $search
}

So... this will let you take some operation on every directory in the tree. There are a bunch of things left out of this code, so beware that there are pitfalls. See: opendir, readdir, closedir.

- taubz

* gian is NOT a perl programmer, and therefore cannot contribute further...

Umm...thanks taubz, but...were you mocking me? ;-) I couldn't tell. I *do* understand recursion (even mentioned it in the original post), and do understand sub routines. I had a very similar (but more complete) version of what you had, but I wasn't using a while loop with a counter instead of foreach. Don't ask why. So, changed that, but still the original program exists.

I put the absolute path of the dirs into @dirs, and use:
while(<*>) {
# get absolute path, put it in $dirpath
push(@dirs,$dirpath) if (-d $_);
}

I use chdir to get into each directory, and then it does the while(<*>) thing again. It doesn't work too well and probably isn't efficient either.

*a while later* haha...realized that I doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. It should work now. I'll keep you posted.

Yep, working perfectly. cool.

I wasn't mocking you... tho I guess I misunderstood.