Perl Cookbook

Processing All Files in a Directory Recursively

Problem

You want to do something to each file and subdirectory in a particular directory.

Solution

Use the standard File::Find module.

use File::Find;
sub process_file {
    # do whatever;
}
find(\&process_file, @DIRLIST);

Discussion

File::Find provides a convenient way to process a directory recursively. It does the directory scans and recursion for you. All you do is pass find a code reference and a list of directories. For each file in those directories, recursively, find calls your function.

Before calling your function, find changes to the directory being visited, whose path relative to the starting directory is stored in the $File::Find::dir variable. $_ is set to the basename of the file being visited, and the full path of that file can be found in $File::Find::name. Your code can set $File::Find::prune to true to tell find not to descend into the directory just seen.

This simple example demonstrates File::Find. We give find an anonymous subroutine that prints the name of each file visited and adds a / to the names of directories:

@ARGV = qw(.) unless @ARGV;
use File::Find;
find sub { print $File::Find::name, -d && '/', "\n" }, @ARGV;

This prints a / after directory names using the -d file test operator, which returns the empty string '' if it fails.

The following program prints the sum of everything in a directory. It gives find an anonymous subroutine to keep a running sum of the sizes of each file it visits. That includes all inode ...