Pro Perl

CHAPTER 13Files and Directories

There are plenty of applications involving files that do not involve opening a filehandle. Examples include copying, moving, or renaming files, and interrogating files for their size, permissions, or ownership. In this chapter, we cover the manipulation of files and directories in ways other than opening filehandles to read or write them using Perl's built-in functions. We also look at the various modules provided as standard with Perl to make file handling both simpler and portable across different platforms, finding files with wildcards through file name globbing, and creating temporary files.

While the bulk of this chapter is concerned with files, we also spend some time looking at directories, which while ...