[MacPerl-AnyPerl] Re: macperl-anyperl-digest V1 #24

[Jeremy Andrews <webmaster@alaskanweb.net>]

>From owner-macperl-anyperl@cfcl.com  Tue Jun 29 22:01:34 1999
Message-Id: <v04205103b39f4f383d90@[199.165.65.101]>
In-Reply-To: <199906291100.EAA19568@cfcl.com>
References: <199906291100.EAA19568@cfcl.com>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 1999 20:52:18 -0800

Hello,

Thanks, Ronald, for the numerous tips, especially useful for a two
week old Perl newbie like myself.  I must say I was a little sad to
see just how many mistakes I had in that short piece of code...

I've got a couple more questions...

> > 	unless (@directories eq "") {
>
>@directories will _never_ eq "".  In a scalar context, an array evaluates
>to the number of elements in the array.  This will be 0 if the array is
>empty, or a positive integer if the array is not empty, but certainly never
>the null string.

My tutorial is the O'Reilly book: Programming Perl (which I must say
I'm very happy with), and I thought I read early on that the way Perl
parses variables makes "0" = a boolean FALSE = "" (null).  I've
tested this by setting a scalar to 0 (such a $foo=0) and then to null
(such as $foo="") and in either case I'm able to evaluate this with a
simple:
if ($foo) { &foo; }

Does this not work with Arrays?  Perhaps above I could have said:
unless (!@directories) {	?

In which case, what's the difference between
if (!@directories)
and
if (@directories eq "")
?

>You should include a useful error message when you die.

Point well taken...  Actually, I've set up a special error subroutine
I call when there's an error - I removed this from the code when I
posted it to this mail group in the interests of brevity.  :)

>Instead of writing the solution from scratch, I would recommend using the
>finddepth() function from the File::Find module.

I figured there HAD to be a simpler way!  :)

Thanks Jim and Geoff for suggesting rmtree -- I must admit I wasn't
even aware of the modules yet, not yet that far in my Perl manual.
Silly me...  Anyway, I'm using File::Path successfully (as well as a
few other handy modules).

Thanks again for the help!  :)

				-Jeremy
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