From: Markus <markus@...>
Date: 2004-08-31T04:02:38+09:00
Subject: Re: Searching Directories

Pseudo-code is your friend.  What you say you want to do is something
like:

define find_stuff_in a_directory
    for each thing in a_directory
        if it is a directory 
            find stuff in it (unless it's . & ..)
          else (when it's a file)
            print information about it if its interesting

All of this is from you e-mail, and could apply to any language.
Now for the ruby part.  Look up the class Dir, which will give you the
contents of a directory as an array, Array (and Enumerable) which let
you walk through instances, and Regexp which let you test strings to see
if they match patterns.

Note that the recursion sort of takes care of itself in the forth line
of the pseudo code.

Have fun.

-- MarkusQ






On Mon, 2004-08-30 at 11:40, Jabari Zakiya wrote:
> I'm trying to figure out the best way to accomplish this task.
> 
> Being new to Ruby, I'm trying to be efficient (if not elegant),
> but first just want something that works.
> 
> I'm using Ruby 1.8.2 rc4 on Windows 2000.
> 
> Here's the task.
> 
> --------------
> I have text files of lastnames, one name per line.
> 
> I want to read each name from each file, and determine
> if that name is part of any file which has the extensions
> *.txt or *.doc or *.rtf which occur in any directory within
> the tree structure for a given top level directory.
> 
> The human interface is something simple like this:
> 
> The text filename is keyboard entered into "NameListFile".
> The top-level-dir is keyboard entered into "DirToSearch".
> The output-file   is keyboard entered into "SearchResults".
> 
> Doing something like: DirItems = Dir.entries(DirToSearch)
> I can get an array of items in the top-level directory.
> 
> Given this array of files and directories, I just need to
> check to see if an item is a "file" or "directory".
> 
> If its a "file" I check to see that its extension is
> *.txt or *.doc or *.rtf. If the file has any of those
> extensions, I then check to see whether the filename
> contains, in any part, a name from "NameListFile".
> 
> If YES, I print the name in an output file in the formant:
> Name, filedate, filename(fullpath relative to "DirToSearch")
> 
> If an item in DirItems is a "directory" then I do the checking
> process for the entries in that directory, etc, etc, untill
> every file in every directory is searched.
> 
> It seems this is a natural case to use recursion to check all
> the directories in the tree, but I'm not sure which methods
> to use to do this.
> 
> This seems like a pretty easy/standard thing to do, but I just
> don't know enough ruby (yet) to do it easy.
> 
> Your help and guidance is appreciated in advance.
> 
> Jabari