Using Perl to rename files in a directory - perl

Question

I'd like to take a directory and for all email (*.msg) files, remove the 'RE ' at the beginning. I have the following code but the rename fails.
opendir(DIR, 'emails') or die "Cannot open directory";
#files = readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);
for (#files){
next if $_ !~ m/^RE .+msg$/;
$old = $_;
s/RE //;
rename($old, $_) or print "Error renaming: $old\n";
}

Answer 1

If your ./emails directory contains these files:
1.msg
2.msg
3.msg
then your #files will look something like ('.', '..', '1.msg', '2.msg', '3.msg') but your rename wants names like 'emails/1.msg', 'emails/2.msg', etc. So you can chdir before renaming:
chdir('emails');
for (#files) {
#...
}
You'd probably want to check the chdir return value too.
Or add the directory names yourself:
rename('emails/' . $old, 'emails/' . $_) or print "Error renaming $old: $!\n";
# or rename("emails/$old", "emails/$_") if you like string interpolation
# or you could use map if you like map
You might want to combine your directory reading and filtering using grep:
my #files = grep { /^RE .+msg$/ } readdir(DIR);
or even this:
opendir(DIR, 'emails') or die "Cannot open directory";
for (grep { /^RE .+msg$/ } readdir(DIR)) {
(my $new = $_) =~ s/^RE //;
rename("emails/$_", "emails/$new") or print "Error renaming $_ to $new: $!\n";
}
closedir(DIR);

Answer 2

You seem to be assuming glob-like behavior rather than than readdir-like behavior.
The underlying readdir system call returns just the filenames within the directory, and will include two entries . and ... This carries through to the readdir function in Perl, just to give a bit more detail on mu's answer.
Alternately, there's not much point to using readdir if you're collecting all the results in an array anyways.
#files = glob('emails/*');

Answer 3

As already mentioned, your script fails because of the path you expect and the script uses are not the same.
I would suggest a more transparent usage. Hardcoding a directory is not a good idea, IMO. As I learned one day when I made a script to alter some original files, with the hardcoded path, and a colleague of mine thought this would be a nice script to borrow to alter his copies. Ooops!
Usage:
perl script.pl "^RE " *.msg
i.e. regex, then a file glob list, where the path is denoted in relation to the script, e.g. *.msg, emails/*.msg or even /home/pat/emails/*.msg /home/foo/*.msg. (multiple globs possible)
Using the absolute paths will leave the user with no doubt as to which files he'll be affecting, and it will also make the script reusable.
Code:
use strict;
use warnings;
use v5.10;
use File::Copy qw(move);
my $rx = shift; # e.g. "^RE "
if ($ENV{OS} =~ /^Windows/) { # Patch for Windows' lack of shell globbing
#ARGV = map glob, #ARGV;
}
for (#ARGV) {
if (/$rx/) {
my $new = s/$rx//r; # Using non-destructive substitution
say "Moving $_ to $new ...";
move($_, $new) or die $!;
}
}

Answer 4

I don't know if the regex fits the specifig name of the files, but in one line this could be done with:
perl -E'for (</path/to/emails*.*>){ ($new = $_) =~ s/(^RE)(.*$)/$2/; say $_." -> ".$new}
(say ... is nice for testing, just replace it with rename $_,$new or rename($_,$new) )
<*.*> read every file in the current directory
($new = $_) =~ saves the following substitution in $new and leaves $_ as intact
(^RE) save this match in $1 (optional) and just match files with "RE" at the beginning
(.*$) save everything until and including the end ($) of the line -> into $2
substitute the match with the string in$2