Perl for Web Site Management

Renaming Files

In this chapter, we’re going to pretend we’re working on a web site that was developed by someone working in a Windows environment (where filenames are case-insensitive, and HTML files typically get .htm filename extensions). Now, however, that site has been moved to a Unix web server, and you wish to make the following changes:

• Rename all the .htm files so that the filenames end with .html.

• Change the filenames (some of which feature uppercase letters) so that they are uniformly lowercase.

• Modify all the HREF attributes contained in those pages so that they match your changes to the filenames.

If you had only a few files to deal with, you could just do all this manually. Filenames could be changed one at a time using the Unix mv (for “move”) command, which has the effect of renaming the file whose name is given in its first argument to the name given in its second argument:

[jbc@andros testsite]$ mv Index.HTM index.html

You could then edit the HREF attributes of each file in a text editor, changing <A HREF="Index.HTM"> to <A HREF="index.html">. And so on.

But what if you have a lot of files that you want to manipulate? At a certain point, the effort of manually making all those changes (and policing the errors that will inevitably creep in as you grind your way through this boring task) is going to be less than the effort of writing a tool to make the changes for you. At this early stage in your education that break-even point will come later (since creating the tool ...