Perl mv files

Viewed 16k times. Zaid Arav Arav 4, 20 20 gold badges 67 67 silver badges bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. The cost of system swamps everything else. File::Copy::move and rename have about the same cost, so you may as well use the safer move which works across filesystems.

The other advantage is it doesn't expose you to security holes due to passing data to the shell. Ether Ether I wonder if there are any statistics on what the performance differences are?

Without any numbers, I wouldn't add that to my answer, since it might turn out that the system version was actually faster. Without a benchmark, its just a guess. Oh thanks I have added that to my answer.

Unfortunately the edit history got deleted by a later tidyup edit. Schwern - could he fact that move and rename have the same cost be attribute to the fact that the underlying code is smart enough to execute an underlying filesystem rename when it's possible, same as the code in Unix's "mv" command?

I must admit to being too lazy to check at 1am : — DVK. Schwern - also, while your approach of actually benchmarking is of course the correct ultimate arbiter, the rule of thumb of "the cost of forking significantly exceeds most other costs" is very rarely one that misfires, at least when dealing with properly coded Perl core modules. Show 1 more comment. Sign up or log in Sign up using Google. If the destination already exists and is a directory, and the source is not a directory, then the source file will be renamed into the directory specified by the destination.

If possible, move will simply rename the file. Otherwise, it copies the file to the new location and deletes the original.

If an error occurs during this copy-and-delete process, you may be left with a possibly partial copy of the file under the destination name. You may use the mv alias for this function in the same way that you may use the cp alias for copy. File::Copy also provides the syscopy routine, which copies the file specified in the first parameter to the file specified in the second parameter, preserving OS-specific attributes and file structure.

For Unix systems, this is equivalent to the simple copy routine, which doesn't preserve OS-specific attributes. For VMS systems, this calls the rmscopy routine see below. For Win32 systems, this calls WinCopyFile. If both arguments to copy are not file handles, then copy will perform a "system copy" of the input file to a new output file, in order to preserve file attributes, indexed file structure, etc. The buffer size parameter is ignored. If either argument to copy is a handle to an opened file, then data is copied using Perl operators, and no effort is made to preserve file attributes or record structure.

The first and second arguments may be strings, typeglobs, typeglob references, or objects inheriting from IO::Handle; they are used in all cases to obtain the filespec of the input and output files, respectively. The name and type of the input file are used as defaults for the output file, if necessary. A new version of the output file is always created, which inherits the structure and RMS attributes of the input file, except for owner and protections and possibly timestamps; see below.

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How to remove, copy or rename a file with Perl unlink remove rm del delete copy cp rename move mv File::Copy. Prev Next. Written by Gabor Szabo. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to post them on the source of this page in GitHub. Source on GitHub.