Question

I have a Perl script which takes a few arguments. It is executed like this:

exec myscript.pl --file=/path/to/input/file --logfile=/path/to/logfile/logfile.log

I have the following line in the script:

open LOGFILE, ">>$logFilePath" or die "Can't open '$logFilePath': $!\n";

Where $logfilePath is taken from the command line.
If there is a path, /path/to/logfile/, but no logfile.log, it just creates it (which is the desired action). However, it fails to start if there is no such path. How can I make the script create the path for the logfile, if it does not exist prior to running the script?

Answer 1

Suppose you have the path to the logfile (which may or may not include the filename: logfile.log) in the variable $full_path. Then, you can create the respective directory tree if needed:

use File::Basename qw( fileparse );
use File::Path qw( make_path );
use File::Spec;

my ( $logfile, $directories ) = fileparse $full_path;
if ( !$logfile ) {
    $logfile = 'logfile.log';
    $full_path = File::Spec->catfile( $full_path, $logfile );
}

if ( !-d $directories ) {
    make_path $directories or die "Failed to create path: $directories";
}

Now, $full_path will contain the full path to the logfile.log file. The directory tree in the path will have also been created.