Excellent points, all From: Wiggins d'Anconia [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] >>> And a reason why using a shell command to copy a file is a bad idea. <<<
Well, the 'shell' and 'copy' association in this case is actually something of a red herring. The point of this particular script is not to copy files, it is to illustrate to a non-programmer an easy and dirty way of executing a program and then capturing some 'results' for analysis. In this case, the file copying batch program was used simply because it produces readily verifiable results (either the .bak files are there, one for each original file specified, or they're not.) >>>opendir DIR2, '.' or die "Can't open directory for reading a second time: $!"; my @after = readdir DIR2; closedir DIR2; <<< Well, I boiled the script down to essentials before posting it, including taking out some error handling (not on these particular commands though.) However, in this particular instance, there were no errors to trap. The *dirs worked correctly, they just weren't picking up the changes made to the directory because those changes were not visible to Perl until after the file handle to the shell was closed or otherwise reset. >>> As an aside, if you must use a shell command you are better off sticking with system, until you need the output which is provided by backticks, only use the piped open form when you need to communicate with the command you are running. <<< I'm certain you're right. As it happens, in this particular instance the script IS piping additional messages to the shell. Is open() the only means of doing that? daniel -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
