From tim.schmitz@sabre.com

I was happy to see perl was included with Apple's new OSX server. I
installed a perl script that I have been running on a SUN box for a long
time. The perl script uses the "find" function, which lets you
recursively dig down and collect all files and folders from a certain
path down. (i.e. if the path is "/", you can get the name of EVERY file
and directory in the filesystem.) This function works fine if the path I
give it points to a UNIX partition, but if the path I give it is in a
Mac partition (our share point for mac users), it doesn't do any
recursion. I can only see the first level.

Thanks,

Tim Schmitz
tim.schmitz@​sabre.com

From [Unknown Contact. See original ticket]

I was happy to see perl was included with Apple's new OSX server.

Agreed. But, if anybody in Apple's Mac OS X group is watching, could you
please send the perl porters your hints file and/or any source patches you
used to get perl going? Help save the world, and all that.

I installed a perl script that I have been running on a SUN box for a long
time. The perl script uses the "find" function, which lets you
recursively dig down and collect all files and folders from a certain
path down. (i.e. if the path is "/", you can get the name of EVERY file
and directory in the filesystem.) This function works fine if the path I
give it points to a UNIX partition, but if the path I give it is in a
Mac partition (our share point for mac users), it doesn't do any
recursion. I can only see the first level.

Ah. UNIX (and perl) finds save time by working out that the number of
child directories of a directory is equal to its link-count minus two.
This is only true on UNIX filesystems, or on really good emulations of
them. Looks like Apple doesn't fake up the link count so as to allow such
an assumption on HFS volumes viewed from Mac OS X. You need to rebuild
perl, telling Configure -Ddont_use_nlink. Except you can't, unless Apple
has supplied perl source which compiles on Mac OS X.

See the file hints/machten.sh in the distribution for an example of setting
this configuration variable. Apple needs somithing like this in its hint
file too.

If you can't rebuild perl, see the man page for File​::Find, which tells you
how to arrange that link-count is ignored at run time.

Tim, if you have a support contract with Apple, please feed this back. Thanks.

--
Dominic Dunlop