PHP has a great function called in_array that allows you to test a value against an array to see if the value is in the array, returning TRUE or FALSE depending. I've now had to come up with this same thing in Perl a couple of times so I figured I would share. I can't remember where I found help or I'd reference them. But here you go. I've included both a syntax highlighted screenshot and the plain text to copy and paste.



my @states = ('California', 'Nevada', 'Texas', 'Utah');
my $findme = 'Utah';

if (in_array($findme, \@states)) {
  print "Found it!";
} else {
  print "Not found.";
}

sub in_array {
  my ($item, $array) = @_;
  my %hash = map { $_ => 1 } @$array;
  if ($hash{$item}) { return 1; } else { return 0; }
}

Getting directory and file permissions just right on Linux can be tricky because directories compared to files have different settings. This makes it so that a general, recursive chmod command will not work. This is where the power of using both 'find' and 'chmod' together comes in handy.

find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;

The above two commands do the following:

1. Search in the current directory represented by the dot.
find .

2. Look for the files or directories, respectively.
-type f
-type d

3. They execute the chmod command when they find it.
-exec chmod 644 {} \;
-exec chmod 755 {} \;

That's a really simplified example, but hopefully it helps out.