How can I break out of recursive find function once a specific file is found?

Question

I'm using the File::Find module to traverse a directory tree. Once I find a specific file, I want to stop searching. How can I do that?

   find (\$processFile, $mydir);

   sub processFile() {
      if ($_ =~ /target/) {
         # How can I return from find here?
      }
   }

Answer 1

Seems like you will have to die:

eval {
    find (\$processFile, $mydir);
};

if ( $@ ) {
   if ( $@ =~ m/^found it/ ) {
        # be happy
    }
    else ( $@ ) {
        die $@;
    }
}
else {
   # be sad
}


sub processFile() {
   if ($_ =~ /target/) {
      die 'found it';
   }
}

Answer 2

In addition to what everyone else said, you may wish to take a look at File-Find-Object, which is both iterative (and as such capable of being interrupted in the middle) and capable of instantiation (so you can initiate and use several at once, or instantiate an F-F-O object based while performing another scan, etc.)

The downside for it is that it isn't core, but it only has Class::Accessor as a dependency, and is pure-Perl so it shouldn't be hard to install.

I should warn you that I am its maintainer, so I may be a bit biased.