How do I distinguish a file from a directory in Perl?

Question

I'm trying to traverse through all the subdirectories of the current directory in Perl, and get data from those files. I'm using grep to get a list of all files and folders in the given directory, but I don't know which of the values returned is a folder name and which is a file with no file extention.

How can I tell the difference?

Answer 1

You can use a -d file test operator to check if something is a directory. Here's some of the commonly useful file test operators

    -e  File exists.
    -z  File has zero size (is empty).
    -s  File has nonzero size (returns size in bytes).
    -f  File is a plain file.
    -d  File is a directory.
    -l  File is a symbolic link.

See perlfunc manual page for more

Also, try using File::Find which can recurse directories for you. Here's a sample which looks for directories....

sub wanted {
     if (-d) { 
         print $File::Find::name." is a directory\n";
     }
}

find(\&wanted, $mydir);