Who is this for
This
article is for programmers who need to get file attributes under a
Windows operating System
What you need to know
Basic Windows commands
Basic Perl programming
Introduction
Sometime
ago, I needed to compare two directories and compare the timestamp of
the files in these directories. This was fairly easy. However, the
difficult part was to recurse to files within subdirectories.
On a Linux/Unix machine, you can do a stat in Perl and check for the directory bit in the file mode item returned from stat.
But this is Windows so stat does not return any information on whether the name is a directory or a file. What did I do?
Option 1: The Quick Way
I
have to confess that I cheated. I did this:
open (POOL,
"dir $pool |") || die "Cannot open $pool\n";
while
() {
if ($pool =~ m/<DIR>/gi) { processDir() }
}
This is the simplest way because it uses the DIR command in DOS and determines if the name is a directory or not based on the string <DIR> that is displayed by the command.
Option 2: The Cleaner Way
The cleaner way is to use the Win32::File module. This module has two methods: GetAttributes and SetAttributes. It also has several constants that you can use to determine the attributes of a given file.
The format of the commands are:
GetAttributes($filename, $resultattr);
SetAttributes($filename, $attrtoset);
Each bit of the resulting byte ($resultattr) from GetAttributes identifies an attribute. To determine the attribute of a file, you need to check if the bit is a 1. You can use these constants to simplify things for you.
This is a sample routine to show how this works:
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