In the command shell, you change the name of a file with the
rename
command. And so it is with Perl, too, where this operation is denoted with
rename(
$old
,
$new
)
. Here's how to change the file named
fred
into
barney
:
rename("fred","barney") || die "Can't rename fred to barney: $!";
Like most other functions, the
rename
function returns a true value if successful, so test this result to see whether the
rename
has indeed worked.
The
rename
function is perhaps more like the command-prompt
move
command than the command-prompt
rename
command. Perl's
rename
can move a file into a different directory, as can
move
.
The
move
command performs a little behind-the-scenes magic to create a full pathname when you say
move file some-directory
. However, the
rename
function cannot. The equivalent Perl operation is:
rename("file
","some-directory/file
");
Note that in Perl we had to say the name of the file within the new
directory explicitly. If you try to rename a file to a filename that already exists,
rename
will overwrite the existing file; this result is different than that of the Windows NT
rename
command, which will fail if the file already exists.