File::Find(3perl) Perl Programmers Reference Guide File::Find(3perl)
NAME
File::Find - Traverse a directory tree.
SYNOPSIS
use File::Find;
find(\&wanted, @directories_to_search);
sub wanted { ... }
use File::Find;
finddepth(\&wanted, @directories_to_search);
sub wanted { ... }
use File::Find;
find({ wanted => \&process, follow => 1 }, '.');
DESCRIPTION
These are functions for searching through directory trees doing work on
each file found similar to the Unix find(1) command. "File::Find"
exports two functions, "find" and "finddepth". They work similarly but
have subtle differences.
find
find(\&wanted, @directories);
find(\%options, @directories);
find() does a depth-first search over the given @directories in the
order they are given. For each file or directory found, it calls
the &wanted subroutine. (See below for details on how to use the
&wanted function). Additionally, for each directory found, it will
chdir() into that directory and continue the search, invoking the
&wanted function on each file or subdirectory in the directory.
finddepth
finddepth(\&wanted, @directories);
finddepth(\%options, @directories);
finddepth() works just like find() except that it invokes the
&wanted function for a directory after invoking it for the
directory's contents. It does a postorder traversal instead of a
preorder traversal, working from the bottom of the directory tree up
where find() works from the top of the tree down.
Despite the name of the finddepth() function, both find() and
finddepth() perform a depth-first search of the directory hierarchy.
%options
The first argument to find() is either a code reference to your &wanted
function, or a hash reference describing the operations to be performed
for each file. The code reference is described in "The wanted function"
below.
Here are the possible keys for the hash:
"wanted"
The value should be a code reference. This code reference is
described in "The wanted function" below. The &wanted subroutine is
mandatory.
"bydepth"
Reports the name of a directory only AFTER all its entries have been
reported. Entry point finddepth() is a shortcut for specifying "{
bydepth => 1 }" in the first argument of find().
"preprocess"
The value should be a code reference. This code reference is used to
preprocess the current directory. The name of the currently
processed directory is in $File::Find::dir. Your preprocessing
function is called after readdir(), but before the loop that calls
the wanted() function. It is called with a list of strings (actually
file/directory names) and is expected to return a list of strings.
The code can be used to sort the file/directory names
alphabetically, numerically, or to filter out directory entries
based on their name alone. When "follow" or "follow_fast" are in
effect, "preprocess" is a no-op.
"postprocess"
The value should be a code reference. It is invoked just before
leaving the currently processed directory. It is called in void
context with no arguments. The name of the current directory is in
$File::Find::dir. This hook is handy for summarizing a directory,
such as calculating its disk usage. When "follow" or "follow_fast"
are in effect, "postprocess" is a no-op.
"follow"
Causes symbolic links to be followed. Since directory trees with
symbolic links (followed) may contain files more than once and may
even have cycles, a hash has to be built up with an entry for each
file. This might be expensive both in space and time for a large
directory tree. See "follow_fast" and "follow_skip" below. If
either "follow" or "follow_fast" is in effect:
• It is guaranteed that an "lstat" has been called before the
user's wanted() function is called. This enables fast file
checks involving "_". Note that this guarantee no longer holds
if "follow" or "follow_fast" are not set.
• There is a variable $File::Find::fullname which holds the
absolute pathname of the file with all symbolic links resolved.
If the link is a dangling symbolic link, then fullname will be
set to "undef".
"follow_fast"
This is similar to "follow" except that it may report some files
more than once. It does detect cycles, however. Since only
symbolic links have to be hashed, this is much cheaper both in space
and time. If processing a file more than once (by the user's
wanted() function) is worse than just taking time, the option
"follow" should be used.
"follow_skip"
"follow_skip==1", which is the default, causes all files which are
neither directories nor symbolic links to be ignored if they are
about to be processed a second time. If a directory or a symbolic
link are about to be processed a second time, "File::Find" dies.
"follow_skip==0" causes "File::Find" to die if any file is about to
be processed a second time.
"follow_skip==2" causes "File::Find" to ignore any duplicate files
and directories but to proceed normally otherwise.
"dangling_symlinks"
Specifies what to do with symbolic links whose target doesn't exist.
If true and a code reference, will be called with the symbolic link
name and the directory it lives in as arguments. Otherwise, if true
and warnings are on, a warning of the form "symbolic_link_name is a
dangling symbolic link\n" will be issued. If false, the dangling
symbolic link will be silently ignored.
"no_chdir"
Does not chdir() to each directory as it recurses. The wanted()
function will need to be aware of this, of course. In this case, $_
will be the same as $File::Find::name.
"untaint"
If find is used in taint-mode ("-T" command line switch or "if EUID
!= UID" or "if EGID != GID"), then internally directory names have
to be untainted before they can be "chdir"'d to. Therefore they are
checked against a regular expression "untaint_pattern". Note that
all names passed to the user's wanted() function are still tainted.
If this option is used while not in taint-mode, "untaint" is a no-
op.
"untaint_pattern"
See above. This should be set using the "qr" quoting operator. The
default is set to "qr|^([-+@\w./]+)$|". Note that the parentheses
are vital.
"untaint_skip"
If set, a directory which fails the "untaint_pattern" is skipped,
including all its sub-directories. The default is to "die" in such a
case.
The wanted function
The wanted() function does whatever verifications you want on each file
and directory. Note that despite its name, the wanted() function is a
generic callback function, and does not tell "File::Find" if a file is
"wanted" or not. In fact, its return value is ignored.
The "wanted" function takes no arguments but rather does its work
through a collection of variables.
$File::Find::dir is the current directory name,
$_ is the current filename within that directory
$File::Find::name is the complete pathname to the file.
The above variables have all been localized and may be changed without
affecting data outside of the wanted function.
For example, when examining the file /some/path/foo.ext you will have:
$File::Find::dir = /some/path/
$_ = foo.ext
$File::Find::name = /some/path/foo.ext
You are chdir()'d to $File::Find::dir when the function is called,
unless "no_chdir" was specified. Note that when changing to directories
is in effect, the root directory (/) is a somewhat special case inasmuch
as the concatenation of $File::Find::dir, '/' and $_ is not literally
equal to $File::Find::name. The table below summarizes all variants:
$File::Find::name $File::Find::dir $_
default / / .
no_chdir=>0 /etc / etc
/etc/x /etc x
no_chdir=>1 / / /
/etc / /etc
/etc/x /etc /etc/x
When "follow" or "follow_fast" are in effect, there is also a
$File::Find::fullname. The function may set $File::Find::prune to prune
the tree unless "bydepth" was specified. Unless "follow" or
"follow_fast" is specified, for compatibility reasons ("find.pl",
find2perl) there are in addition the following globals available:
$File::Find::topdir, $File::Find::topdev, $File::Find::topino,
$File::Find::topmode and $File::Find::topnlink.
This library is useful for the "find2perl" tool (distributed with the
App::find2perl CPAN module), which when fed:
find2perl / -name .nfs\* -mtime +7 \
-exec rm -f {} \; -o -fstype nfs -prune
produces something like:
sub wanted {
/^\.nfs.*\z/s &&
(($dev, $ino, $mode, $nlink, $uid, $gid) = lstat($_)) &&
int(-M _) > 7 &&
unlink($_)
||
($nlink || (($dev, $ino, $mode, $nlink, $uid, $gid) = lstat($_))) &&
$dev < 0 &&
($File::Find::prune = 1);
}
Notice the "_" in the above "int(-M _)": the "_" is a magical filehandle
that caches the information from the preceding stat(), lstat(), or
filetest.
Here's another interesting wanted function. It will find all symbolic
links that don't resolve:
sub wanted {
-l && !-e && print "bogus link: $File::Find::name\n";
}
Note that you may mix directories and (non-directory) files in the list
of directories to be searched by the wanted() function.
find(\&wanted, "./foo", "./bar", "./baz/epsilon");
In the example above, no file in ./baz/ other than ./baz/epsilon will be
evaluated by wanted().
See also the script "pfind" on CPAN for a nice application of this
module.
WARNINGS
If you run your program with the "-w" switch, or if you use the
"warnings" pragma, File::Find will report warnings for several weird
situations. You can disable these warnings by putting the statement
no warnings 'File::Find';
in the appropriate scope. See warnings for more info about lexical
warnings.
BUGS AND CAVEATS
$dont_use_nlink
You can set the variable $File::Find::dont_use_nlink to 0 if you are
sure the filesystem you are scanning reflects the number of
subdirectories in the parent directory's "nlink" count.
If you do set $File::Find::dont_use_nlink to 0, you may notice an
improvement in speed at the risk of not recursing into
subdirectories if a filesystem doesn't populate "nlink" as expected.
$File::Find::dont_use_nlink now defaults to 1 on all platforms.
Symlinks
Be aware that the option to follow symbolic links can be dangerous.
Depending on the structure of the directory tree (including symbolic
links to directories) you might traverse a given (physical)
directory more than once (only if "follow_fast" is in effect).
Furthermore, deleting or changing files in a symbolically linked
directory might cause very unpleasant surprises, since you delete or
change files in an unknown directory.
HISTORY
"File::Find" used to produce incorrect results if called recursively.
During the development of perl 5.8 this bug was fixed. The first fixed
version of "File::Find" was 1.01.
SEE ALSO
find(1), find2perl
perl v5.40.1 2026-08-30 File::Find(3perl)
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