Programming PERL in the .NET Environment

File Inquiry Operators

There may be many occasions where a programming task depends upon the type of one or more files. For example, you may need to know whether a name represents a file or whether a file is a directory. Perl has several operators that can help you toward these tasks. Table 3-3 shows some of these operators.

Table 3-3. Some File Inquiry Operators

Operator	Meaning
-e	File exists.
-z	File has zero size.
-s	File has nonzero size (returns size).
-f	File is a plain file.
-d	File is a directory.
-T	File is a text file.
-B	File is a binary file (opposite of –T).
-M	Age of file in days

Here is a program that illustrates a few of these operators. See the folder FileStat.

 % type filestat.pl # # filestat.pl # print "Enter a filename "; chomp($fn = <STDIN>); ...