Question

I am studying and extending a Perl script written by others. It has a line:

@pub=`ls $sourceDir | grep '\.htm' | grep -v Default |  head  -550`;
foreach (@pub) {

   my $docName = $_;
   chomp($docName);
   $docName =~ s/\.htm$//g;
    ............}

I know that it uses a UNIX command firstly to take out all the htm files, then get rid of file extension.

Now I need to do one thing, which is also very important. That is, I need to change the file name of the actual files stored, by replacing the white space with underscore. I am stuck here because I am not sure whether I should follow his code style, achieving this by using UNIX, or I should do this in Perl? The point is that I need to modify the real file on the disk, not the string which used to hold the file name.

Thanks.

Answer 1

It will be faster to use File::Copy to move the file to its new name rather than using this method which forks off a new process, spawns a new shell, etc. it takes more memory and is slower than doing it within perl itself.

edit.. you can get rid of all that backtick b.s., too, like this

my @files = grep {!/Default/} glob "$sourcedir/*.html";