Perl help

[Stuff_]

I'm working on an assignment that I have about 99% complete.

 

Basically, what I am doing is taking the linux command, sha256sum, and printing the message digest of every regular file under any directory given in the file on the command line.

 

for example:

$ mysha <rootfile> [sha256file] 

where rootfile is a file with a directory filename inside and sha256file would be the file being written to. if the file being written to is not specified, print to stdout.

 

I've gotten everything, and I am using the diamond operator to go through my rootfile and run the unix command.

 

My issue is, if I do specify a file (sha256file), the diamond operator tries to run through that, assuming it's another file coming from the command line; which is not correct. So then I get a die message saying "unable to open directory", which makes sense.

 

How can I do this?

This is what my code looks like reading:

 

while (<>) {

  $dir = $_;

  chomp $dir; #remove newline at the end of $dir

  opendir(DIR, $dir) or die "Unable to open directory $_: $!\n";

  @files = readdir DIR;

  closedir(DIR);

}

 

then further down I print the sha. The printing is correct, but how do I get the diamond operator to NOT read my 2nd arg (ARGV[1]) ?

 

Hopefully anybody can help. 

Thanks.

[Stuff_]

You know, I was working on this problem for a couple of hours. Then immediately after posting here, I had an epiphany. I thought of just shifting the 2nd arg out of the ARGV array, and voila. That worked.

 

I guess I solved my own problem