Yesterday I had to do some task across all files in a directory. The directory had subdirectories which in turn had subdirectories again. Although I know that there was a Dir module in ruby, I didn’t know that it would have the function necessary. But when I googled I found a method named glob in the Dir module. So I am just writing this post to show how it works.

Dir.glob("/path/to/main/dir/\*\*/\*\*/*.html").each do |s|
  # \*\* is for subdirectory and * is for file
  # It returns an array of path to the files

  s = File.open(s)
  # Do whatever you want
end

This is particularly easy but I was wondering how much time I took.

Also there was another problem due to encoding. These files were encoded in windows-1252. I used my dear linux to fix it.

]$ find . -type f -name '*.html' -exec iconv -f windows-1252 -t utf-8 "{}" -o "{}" \;
  # This command finds all files with name ending with **html**
  # and runs **iconv** to convert them to utf-8 and replaces the files.

These are some easy ones. But it actually took me a whole day to find all this. (Well not a whole day :))