Perl One-liners - Deal with the "too many files" issue

In UNIX, sometimes you end up getting a "too many files" error when using the "cp, mv, or rm" commands if there are thousands of files in a given directory. The usual workaround is to utilize the "find" command.

Without the newer (GNU) find versions, like I don't have... I have to resort to using this type of syntax to display files only in the current directory (I don't want it to descend in to sub-directories). Let say there are tons of "xml" files in the current directory.

#Example using find that will count the number of xml files
find . \( ! -name . -prune -name "*.xml" \) -type f -print | wc -l

Here is an alternative way to count the files in Perl:

perl -e '@a=<*.xml>;map {print "$_\n";} @a;' | wc -l
#Even quicker version
perl -e '@a=<*.xml>;printf("%s\n", scalar(@a));'

The caveat for the Perl version is that you would need enough memory to hold the names of the files in the array @a .

Display all Standard Perl Modules available

Here is a quick way to see all names of the Standard Perl Modules that are installed on your system:

perl -MFile::Find=find -MFile::Spec::Functions -Tlw -e 'find { wanted => sub { print canonpath $_ if /\.pm\z/ }, no_chdir => 1 }, @INC'