Question

I’m trying to write a perl script that reads filenames in a test.txt file into an array, and then deletes the files based on the filenames in the array. Here’s what I’ve got so far…

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

open(FILE, "test.txt") or die("Unable to open file.");

my @data = <FILE>;

close(FILE);

foreach my $line (@data){
        unlink($line);
}

test.txt and remove_files.pl are in the same directory as the files to be removed. I can’t figure out why the script won’t delete the files. Am I missing a module?

Answer 1

Lines read from a file with the readline operator (<...>) will include the newline character. You’ll need to remove it, or else you will be trying to delete a file called "myfile.txt\n" instead of "myfile.txt". Use Perl’s chomp function to trim your input:

foreach $line (@data){
    chomp($line);
    unlink($line);
}