Manual Pages for UNIX Darwin command on man IO::Dir

IO::Dir(3pm) Perl Programmers Reference Guide IO::Dir(3pm)

NAME

IO::Dir - supply object methods for directory handles

SYNOPSIS

use IO::Dir;

$d = IO::Dir->new(".");

if (defined $d) {

while (defined($ = $d->read)) { something($); }

$d->rewind;

while (defined($ = $d->read)) { somethingelse($); }

undef $d;

}

tie %dir, 'IO::Dir', ".";

foreach (keys %dir) {

print $, " " , $dir{$}->size,"\n";

}

DESCRIPTION

The "IO::Dir" package provides two interfaces to perl's directory read-

ing routines.

The first interface is an object approach. "IO::Dir" provides an object

constructor and methods, which are just wrappers around perl's built in directory reading routines.

new ( [ DIRNAME ] )

"new" is the constructor for "IO::Dir" objects. It accepts one

optional argument which, if given, "new" will pass to "open" The following methods are wrappers for the directory related functions built into perl (the trailing `dir' has been removed from the names). See perlfunc for details of these functions.

open ( DIRNAME )

read () seek ( POS ) tell () rewind () close ()

"IO::Dir" also provides an interface to reading directories via a tied

hash. The tied hash extends the interface beyond just the directory reading routines by the use of "lstat", from the "File::stat" package, "unlink", "rmdir" and "utime".

tie %hash, 'IO::Dir', DIRNAME [, OPTIONS ]

The keys of the hash will be the names of the entries in the directory. Reading a value from the hash will be the result of calling "File::stat::lstat". Deleting an element from the hash will delete the corresponding file or subdirectory, provided that "DIRUNLINK" is

included in the "OPTIONS".

Assigning to an entry in the hash will cause the time stamps of the

file to be modified. If the file does not exist then it will be cre-

ated. Assigning a single integer to a hash element will cause both the

access and modification times to be changed to that value. Alterna-

tively a reference to an array of two values can be passed. The first

array element will be used to set the access time and the second ele-

ment will be used to set the modification time.