Question

In as simple a way as possible I am wondering if anyone knows how to archive .log files in a Windows XP directory by simply naming them with the current “localtime()” as part of the file name? (Do not assume there is a lock on the log file.) I tried all kinds of different ways of doing this but couldn’t solve it… and there are no good examples on the web.

Here is what I am looking for:

for (all files > that 1 day old)   
  rename file  to  file.[datestamp].log
end

Answer 1

Well, this looks so easy, I’m probably misunderstanding something. The task is to move for example “yada.log” to “yada.2011-05-04.log”? Then how about this:

use strict;
use warnings;

use File::Copy;
use POSIX qw(strftime);

my $dir = $ARGV[0] or die "Usage: $0 <directory>";
my $now_string = strftime "%Y-%m-%d_%H%M%S", localtime;

opendir DIR, $dir or die $!;
my @files = readdir DIR;

chdir $dir or die $!;
for my $file (@files) {
    next if (-d $file);
    next unless ($file =~ /^(.*)(\.log)$/i);
    my $dst = $1 . "." . $now_string . $2;
    move ($file, $dst) or die "Failed to move $file: $!";
}