Copying a directory and all it's contents

You want to to copy a directory (and all the files and subdirectories in it), from your Perl program.

You want functionality equivalent to the recursive copying performed by the Unix "cp -R" command, but you don't want to use a system() call to do this.

File::NCopy

Use the File::NCopy module to recursively copy a directory and all it's contents.

    #!/usr/bin/perl

    use strict;
    use warnings;
    use File::NCopy;

    my $source_dir  = 'aa';
    my $target_dir  = 'bb';

    mkdir($target_dir) or die "Could not mkdir $target_dir: $!";

    my $cp = File::NCopy->new(recursive => 1);
    $cp->copy("$source_dir/*", $target_dir) 
        or die "Could not perform rcopy of $source_dir to $target_dir: $!";

Usage notes

If you're familiar with the Unix copy command cp, you might be excused for thinking that you could simply copy the existing source directory to a brand new target directory as follows:

    $cp->copy($source_dir, $target_dir);   # This will fail

Instead you have to first create the target directory with the mkdir function, and then supply the source argument with the trailing * wildcard, in order to get the desired behaviour:

    $cp->copy("$source_dir/*", $target_dir)  #....

See also

    perldoc File::Copy