R – How to break out of recursive find function once a specific file is found

file-findperlrecursion

I'm using the File::Find module to traverse a directory tree. Once I find a specific file, I want to stop searching. How can I do that?

   find (\$processFile, $mydir);

   sub processFile() {
      if ($_ =~ /target/) {
         # How can I return from find here?
      }
   }

Best Answer

Seems like you will have to die:

eval {
    find (\$processFile, $mydir);
};

if ( $@ ) {
   if ( $@ =~ m/^found it/ ) {
        # be happy
    }
    else ( $@ ) {
        die $@;
    }
}
else {
   # be sad
}


sub processFile() {
   if ($_ =~ /target/) {
      die 'found it';
   }
}

Related Solutions

Linux – List files recursively in Linux CLI with path relative to the current directory

Use find:

find . -name \*.txt -print

On systems that use GNU find, like most GNU/Linux distributions, you can leave out the -print.

R – How to use File::Find to print files with the relative path only

The following will print the path for all files under $base, relative to $base (not the current directory):

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use File::Spec;
use File::Find;

# can be absolute or relative (to the current directory)
my $base = '/base/directory';
my @absolute;

find({
    wanted   => sub { push @absolute, $_ if -f and -r },
    no_chdir => 1,
}, $base);

my @relative = map { File::Spec->abs2rel($_, $base) } @absolute;
print $_, "\n" for @relative;

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Linux – List files recursively in Linux CLI with path relative to the current directory

R – How to use File::Find to print files with the relative path only

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