Question

This is my perl code to move result to the sent folder.

 system("mv /home/pi/downloads/$result /home/pi/downloads/sent/$result");

The error i get is:

mv: missing destination file operand after `/home/pi/downloads/filename.txt'

What am i doing wrong here?

Answer 1

That’s difficult to say but there’s a few things you can do that should help you solve it.

First make sure your script starts like this:

#!/pathe/to/perl -w

use strict;

Notice the -w to enable warnings. Also use strict will help you identify code issues.

Another thing that helps a lot is storing the command you want to run in a scalar and printing it to see what it is actually doing:

my $result = "filename.txt";
chomp($result);
my $cmd = sprintf("mv /home/pi/downloads/%s /home/pi/downloads/sent/%s", $result, $result);
print "$cmd\n";
system($cmd);

In your script do you get the value for $result from user input? I have a feeling it has a newline character. The chomp function will safely remove newline characters from the end of a string.