date comparison of files with if statements not working

[jonathan184]

Hi the purpose of the script I am trying to do is to access a dir and run the ls -l command which will show the files and the modified date, no w the script is to check two files in that dir , if the file has the modified month and day matching today print message log is fine else the log is not updated and thats it.

Now the script below I managed to parse to get both month and day for the files and the perl day and month

now the script shows successful when showing today but i changed the perl time to yesterday's date by hard coding a value and it still shows the log updated message when it suppose to show log not updated, so it is a problem i am guess ign with my else but i think i did it correct but i cannot seem to find where i am going wrong, could somebody help me out please.

#!/usr/bin/perl
#Purpose: Monitor script to monitor if logs is todays date
 
#Uncomment to use live perl time
# @datepcs = split(/\s+/, scalar localtime);
#    printf ("%s %s %s\n", @datepcs[1,2]);
 
#comment to remove hard coded value
$dateTime ="Jul 26";
print $dateTime;
 
chdir("/home/tibco/tibco/ACS_MQ_ADAPTER/logs");
sleep 2;
$test = "ls -l |";
open (INFO, "$test") || die " Unable to run command $!";
@rows = <INFO>;
 
open (TEST, ">/home/tibco/tibco/acs_monitor.txt") || die " Error could not open log $!";
foreach (@rows) {
 
    if ($_ =~ m/MQJMSListener.log/) {
        ###### Writing to file
        print TEST "$_";
        $_ = split;
        $dates = "$_[5]";
        $dates2 ="$_[6]";
        print $dates . " $dates2";
        #if ($dates . " $dates2" == "$dateTime") {
        if ("$dateTime" == $dates . " $dates2") {
            print "\n This $_[8] is fine \n";
            print TEST '<span class="green">This log matches todays date</span><br>';
        } else {
            print "\n Dates do not match for $_[8] \n";
            print TEST '<br><br><span class="red">This log does not match todays date</span><br>';
        }
    }
 
    if ($_ =~ m/EMSListener.log/) {
        ###### Writing to file
        print TEST "$_";
        $_ = split;
        $dates = "$_[5]";
        $dates2 ="$_[6]";
 
        if ($dates . " $dates2" == "$dateTime") {
            print "\n This $_[8] is fine \n";
            print TEST '<span class="green">This log matches todays date</span><br>';
        } else {
            print "\n Dates do not match for $_[8] \n";
            print TEST '<span class="red">This log does not match todays date</span><br>';
        }
    }
}
close(TEST);
close(INFO);
#END
 

[KevinADC]

Maybe you should be checking string equality instead of numeric equality:

if ($dateTime eq "$dates$dates2") {


never quote scalars (unless absolutely necessary) like you did in this "if" condition:

if ("$dateTime" == $dates . " $dates2") {

only quote variables like I did above when you are constructing a new string. Quoting can hide errors that make debugging a script near impossible, even if you are using "my" and "warnings". Plus it slows down your script because each double-quoted scalar makes a new copy of the scalar that never gets used if you do not assign it to a new scalar or use it in an operation like I did above to compare the two strings. It is a bad habit you should try and rid yourself of earlier instead of later.

[miller]

Instead of parsing an external process, why not just stick with a pure perl solution?

perldoc stat
perldoc -X

The following script prints any file that is been modified today in the specified directory. This could easily be modified to serve your purposes.

use POSIX qw(strftime);
 
use strict;
 
my $today = strftime "%Y%m%d", localtime;
 
my $dir = "/home/tibco/tibco/ACS_MQ_ADAPTER/logs";
 
opendir(DIR, $dir) or die "Can't open $dir: $!";
while (my $file = readdir(DIR)) {
    next if $file =~ /^\.+$/;
 
    my $path = "$dir/$file";
    my $modified = (stat($path))[9];
    my $date = strftime "%Y%m%d", localtime($modified);
 
    print "$file modified today\n" if $date eq $today;
}
closedir(DIR);
 

- Miller

[KevinADC]

this also looks wrong:

$_ = split;


assigning the entire return value of split to a scalar should return the number of splits. You need to assign the return value to a list or array:

@data = split;

and are you sure you want to just use "split" with no arguments?

[jonathan184]

Thanks guys the scripts you gave are really good in a pure perl solution i am still a novice thats why i went this way.

hey guys i made a big mistake, the if statements were fine,
I forgot to declare a variable for dateTime for the perl time section

I only devlared it for hard coding the values. Well it works well withthe hard coded values but how do I put this in variable, i think that is my issue now

this is what i did

I am guess to manipulate the array?

How would i put this in a variable?
 
 @datepcs = split(/\s+/, scalar localtime);
    printf("%s %s", @datepcs[1,2]);

[jonathan184]

oh so i guess it would of bee @row = split;
yes i read split; parses by spaces by default.

this also looks wrong:

$_ = split;


assigning the entire return value of split to a scalar should return the number of splits. You need to assign the return value to a list or array:

@data = split;

and are you sure you want to just use "split" with no arguments?

[jonathan184]

Hey guys I got everything working. Thanks so much for your help.
I guess i learned to do some more troubleshooting and Miller thanks for the script, it is very interesting in my learning of perl. I learned alot from all of you guys on the forum and thanks for helping me once again I appreciate it.

[miller]

Your welcome. Glad you were able to get your script to work.

Btw, the best way you could improve this script or any perl script would be to add a "use strict;" statement to the top.

- Miller

[numberwhun]

And allow me to add "use warnings;" as well. :-)

Jeff

[miller]

I've started using warnings more often. However, I typically consider most of things that it "warns" about as rather superfluous.

The biggest problem that I have with it though is that it provides runtime warnings instead of compile time like "use strict;". This means that I leave "use warnings;" out of any production level code as I do not want to cause the end-user needless worry for something that doesn't matter.

"use strict:" however should be included in any piece of code.

- Miller

[KevinADC]

You can use the -M file operator which returns the date of a file in days since the program started. So if you wanted to see if files are matcing todays date you would see if the number returned by -M is less than one.

chdir('c:\\');
@files = <*>;
for (@files){
   if ((-M) < 1) {
       print $_,"\n";
   }
}

[miller]

I considered using that in the solution that I provided, which is why I included a link to the -X documentation. However, I figured a better introduction to a pure perl solution would closely match what he was already attempting to do. Namely match the current date, not just within 24 hours. Although I suspect that the range would actually be more favorably functionality.

- Miller

[KevinADC]

Certainly. My post is a complimentary extension of what you previously posted, at least I hope it is. ;)