Why does Perl's File::Copy silently fail on Windows 2008?

Question

I have a Perl script that works on Windows XP. It uses File::Copy's move function to move a directory tree to another place on the same drive. The script fails (silently) on Windows 2008. Nothing moved, nothing deleted.

I am using ActiveState Perl 5.10.0 Build 1005 and the File::Copy that comes with it.

Anyone know of issues with ActiveState Perl on Windows 2008 that might cause this?

Example script:

use File::Copy;
print "Move AAA to ZZZ\n";

move("AAA", "ZZZ");

print "Done.\n";

Answer 1

If you don't want to have to check the return value, you can have autodie do it for you.

Since move() and copy() return a zero to indicate an error, and that's what autodie assumes, it's fairly straight forward.

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Copy;

use autodie qw'copy move';

move("AAA", "ZZZ"); # no need to check for error, because of autodie

print "Done.\n";

Assuming that "AAA" doesn't exist, here is the output ( on STDERR ).

Can't move('AAA', 'ZZZ'): No such file or directory at test.pl line 7

Answer 2

I've had weird things happen to me on Windows with moving and removing files. The solution was to use the CPAN module File::Remove.

Answer 3

Rather than slog through another half dozen Perl modules looking for one that did what I wanted, I adopted a hybrid approach and called out to DOS to use the "move" command. DOS move has its own peculiarities. For example, if you copy c:\temp\AAA to c:\temp\BBB and BBB exists already, you get c:\temp\BBB\AAA. But if BBB does not already exist, you get c:\temp\BBB, with no AAA underneath it. To avoid that, I first create BBB (if it does not exist) and then delete it. This causes all the directories down to BBB to be created if absent.

Here is my code:

sub move($$) {
    my ($source, $target) = @_;

    if (! -d $source) {
     print "    ERROR: Source directory does not exist: $source. Not copying to $target.\n";
    }
    elsif (-d $target) {
     print "    ERROR: Target directory already exists: $target. Not copying from $source.\n";
    }
    else {
     $source =~ s|/|\\|g;
     $target =~ s|/|\\|g;
     my $results = `if not exist "$target" mkdir "$target" & rmdir "$target" & move /Y "$source" "$target"`;
     print "    Results of move \"$source\" \"$target\":\n $results\n";
    }
}

Answer 4

I just encountered this myself, and in my particular situation, despite the exact same error ("No such file..."), it was actually that I had a file, from deep within the hierarchy I was renaming, open in a text editor somewhere. As soon as I closed that file, the error stopped occurring.