How can I make this perl command check for subfolders as well?

Question

I'm running Windows 10 and I have a batch file that changes the directory to the required location and a perl command that edits all text files in it by changing Enabled = 1 to Enabled = 0, but I can't figure out how to make the perl command check for subfolders.

@echo off
timeout 1 >nul 2>&1
cd /d D:
timeout 1 >nul 2>&1
cd "D:\MySettings"
timeout 1 >nul 2>&1
perl -wE "@ARGV = glob qq($ARGV[0]); $^I = qq(); while (<>) { s/Enabled =\K.*/ \x220\x22/g; print }" *.txt
Pause

Answer 1

To process files in subfolders as well, and (I presume) in sub-sub-folders, etc, that list of all "entries" ( glob ) need be split into files and folders. Edit the files and repeat the process in subfolders. This is often done recursively but there are other ways. It's a little job to do.

And there are libraries for recursive traversal and processing, of course. For example the core File::Find (or File::Find::Rule ), or Path::Iterator::Rule . But since you also need to edit each file in a simple manner let's look at a more general utility Path::Tiny , which has a few methods for editing files in-place, as well.

If you insist on a command-line program ("one-liner")

perl -MPath::Tiny -we"
    path(qq(.))->visit( sub { 
        my ($entry, $state) = @_; 
        return if not -T;
        path($entry)->edit_lines( sub { s/.../.../g } )
    }, 
    { recurse => 1 }
)"

Here the visit method executes the sub { } callback on each entry under the given folder, and goes on recursively (with that option). We skip entries which aren't ASCII or UTF-8 files, by -T filetest .

Inside the callback, edit_lines processes each line of the file as specified in its sub ; in this case, run the regex from the question. Once it's done with the whole file it replaces the original with the edited version. See docs.

Answer 2

For this, I think it could be only done by perl commands, not in batch commands.

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