Hi Jason, I'm going to comment on your code, and hopefully point to problems in it.
On Tue, 2 Aug 2011 06:02:24 -0700 (PDT) Jason Forget <pixe...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello all, > > I am receive the unintialized value in number lt (<) at error when > running the below perl script. The error is indicated on line 34. > The challenge I face is that this script was written by one person; > modified by another and I am tasked to fix it. I am a beginner to > perl scripting. From what I've read, the (<) needs to be > initialized...??? > > The script is called to delete files from a directory beyond a certain > date. > > #!\Perl\bin\perl -w > # usage: DeleteFiles.pl <dir> <#days> > #use strict; Why is "use strict;" commented out? Every module should have "use strict;" and "use warnings;". See: http://perl-begin.org/tutorials/bad-elements/ > > # sub recurse($) { > sub recurse { If you were going to get rid of the prototype (which is not a good idea - see the above link) please don't comment-out the original line because it just introduces clutter. > # my($path) = @_; > my($path) = $_[0]; > my($days) = $_[1]; This should be written as: my ($path, $days) = @_; You're also missing a space after the my. > my($seconds) = $days*24*60*60; > ## append a trailing / if it's not there > $path .= '\\' if($path !~ /\/$/); The comment is not helpful, and introduces more clutter and a "/" is not a "\". You also probably want to use "/" (slashes) instead of "\\" if you want your script to be portable to UNIXes and other non-Windows platforms. Or use File::Spec: http://perl-begin.org/uses/sys-admin/ > print "Set to delete from ... $path\n"; > ##$path = '\\Working_Temp\\'; > ##print "Hard coded to delete from: $path\n"; > ## print the directory being searched > ##print $path,"\n"; So many commented out lines so much clutter. > open (MYFILE, '>>deletes.bat'); > Well, your indentation is erratic, and furthermore, you're opening the same global filehandles, several times for each time the function is called. See what I say about open style on http://perl-begin.org/tutorials/bad-elements/ > ## loop through the files contained in the directory > for my $eachFile (glob($path.'*')) { > > ## if the file is a directory > if( -d $eachFile) { > ## pass the directory to the routine ( recursion ) > print "recursing $eachFile\n"; > recurse($eachFile, $days); > } else { > > ## print the file ... tabbed for readability > my $now = time; > my @stat = stat("$eachFile"); > if ($stat[9] < ($now - $seconds)) > { > #print "del $eachFile\n"; > print MYFILE "del \"$eachFile\"\n"; > unlink("$eachFile"); > print "Done.\n"; > } print "\t",$eachFile,"\n"; > } > } > OK, you should definitely use opendir instead of glob, next time because it's safer. However, in your case you should use File::Find or a similar module (see http://perl-begin.org/uses/sys-admin/#directory_traversal ) or maybe File::Path's rmtree() function. Your code is not going to remove the directories themselves. Regards, Shlomi Fish. -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish http://www.shlomifish.org/ Original Riddles - http://www.shlomifish.org/puzzles/ Larry Wall applies a patch manually quicker than GNU patch. Please reply to list if it's a mailing list post - http://shlom.in/reply . -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
