Perl Operators   «Prev 

Common uses for file test Operators in Perl


To see if a file exists, you can check it with -e, like this: 
if(-e $filename) {
 print "$filename is there!\n"
}
else {
 print "I didn't find $filename!\n"
}

Is the file a directory? Check it like this: 
if(-d $filename) {
 print "$filename is a directory\n"
}
else {
 print "$filename is not a directory\n"
}

You can use the special filehandle _ to check the same file more than once. This code checks to see if a file is a plain file, then reports its size: 
if(-f $filename) { 
  $size = -s _; 
  print "$filename is $size bytes." 
}
else {
  print "didn't find $filename\n"
}