CODEWITHSUNDEEP
regexperlfilesearch
urbanspr1nter
urbanspr1nter

Reputation: 1357

Searching for Files with specific Regex in filename in Perl

Hi all I was wondering how I can go about searching for files in perl.

Right now I have a line with information that I have tokenized with tab as a delimiter stored into an array. (using split) These arrays contain stub text of filenames I want to search for in a directory. For example Engineering_4.txt would just be "Engin" in my array.

If there are two different files... Engineering_4 and Engineering_5, it would search both these files for content and just extract the information I need from one of them (only 1 contains information I want). I would imagine my script will have to search and store all file names that match and then search through each of these files.

My question is how do I go about searching for files in a directory matching a regular expression in Perl? Also is there a way to limit the file types that I want to search for. For example, I just want to only search for ".txt" files.

Thanks everyone

Upvotes: 2

Views: 10815

Answers (4)

JRFerguson
JRFerguson

Reputation: 7516

You can also use the File::Find module:

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;
my @dirs = @ARGV ? @ARGV : ('.');
my @list;
find( sub{
    push @list, $File::Find::name if -f $_ && $_ =~ m/.+\.txt/ },
    @dirs );
print "$_\n" for @list;

Upvotes: 0

Zaid
Zaid

Reputation: 37146

The glob function returns an array of matching files when provided a wildcard expression.

This means that the files can also be sort-ed before processing:

use Sort::Key::Natural 'natsort';

foreach my $file ( natsort glob "*.txt" ) {  # Will loop over only txt files

    open my $fh, '<', $file or die $!; # Open file and process
}

Upvotes: 0

FailedDev
FailedDev

Reputation: 26930

I guess since you already know the directory you could open it and read it while also filtering it : 

opendir D, 'yourDirectory' or die "Could not open dir: $!\n";
my @filelist = grep(/yourRegex/i, readdir D);

Upvotes: 4

yko
yko

Reputation: 2710

You can do this using glob function of <glob> operator.

while (<Engin*.txt>) {
 print "$_\n";
}

Upvotes: 0

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