Why you should learn a scripting language

by Nathan

You know those little tasks that really need to be done, yet send you scurrying for any excuse to procrastinate? I came up across one of those the other day - I had some files (module1.zip, module2.zip, library1.zip, etc.) and needed to unzip them all into subdirectories with the same name as the zip file. For example, module1.zip should have its contents unzipped to a directory called module1. Not a big deal to just do a few unzip commands, but there were over 120 of these files. Rather than do something crazy (like transfer the files to a windows box, use winzips unzip using filenames as folders then transfer them back) I wrote the following perl script:

#!/usr/bin/perl
system('unzip $_ -d '.(/(.+).zip/)[0]) foreach @ARGV"