From: Osuka Adartse <rocioestradacastaneda@...>
Date: 2004-08-31T05:47:11+09:00
Subject: Re: Searching Directories

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
> 
> 
require 'find'
dirs=Array.new
files=Array.new
Find.find('/directory/path'){|entry|
	if FileTest.directory?(entry)
		dirs.push(entry)
	else
		files.push(entry)
	end
}

#by now dirs and files are arrays of diretories and files, find is 
#recursive so You can use it instead of Dir[]
require 'pp'
pp dirs
#=>["E:/usr\\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0",
  "E:/usr\\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0/files",
  "E:/usr\\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0/classes",
  "E:/usr\\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0/classes/SQLite"]
#process files...
files.each{|f|
   case File.extname(f)
     when '.html' then puts f + ' : is a HTML'
     when 'rid' then puts f + ' : is mmmh something...'
   end
}
#results in
#=>
E:/usr\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0/index.html : is a HTML
E:/usr\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0/fr_method_index.html : is a HTML
E:/usr\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0/fr_file_index.html : is a HTML
E:/usr\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0/fr_class_index.html : is a HTML
E:/usr\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0/files/sqlite_rb.html : is a HTML
E:/usr\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0/files/sqlite_c.html : is a HTML
E:/usr\local/rdoc/sqlite-1.3.0/created.rid : is mmmh something...

hope this may help you...
Adartse