[prog] Perl and find(1)

[Jacinta Richardson]

Perl has its own built-ins for many common Unix functionality.  For example if 
you want a list of files, you're better off using glob() or readdir() rather 
than system and ls.

This increases portability and maintenance of your programs.  It's also easier 
to check whether things succeeded.  Calling out to system also slows down your 
program.

In this case you're likely again to be better off using Perl's File::Find 
module.  File::Find comes standard with the Perl distribution.

Chris Henderson wrote:
> I wrote this script which will go inside some directories and delete
> files but the find(1) command says "-exec" missing. Is it because I'm
> not parsing ls correctly?

I can't even get the find command to work outside of Perl:

jarich at bella:/tmp$ find . -atime +14 -name "*.tgz" -print -exec "ls -al"
find: missing argument to `-exec'

So your error is there.

Anyway, to rewrite this:

> #!/usr/bin/perl
> 
> use strict;
> use warnings;
> use diagnostics;
   use File::Find;

> 
> my @directories = qw(
>    /home/backup/server1
>    /home/backup/server2
>    /home/backup/server3
> );

find(\&wanted, @directories);

sub wanted {

	return unless ( /\.tgz$/ );   # ignore non .tgz files

         return unless ( -A $_ > 14 ); # skip if less than 14 days old

	print;                        # print name of file
}