Re: Random web page displaying

Hi Nauzad,

If I understand the problem right, you'd like to have a little script that picks a file at random and then does something to it. Here is a little code fragment in Perl. It makes a couple of assumptions but you should get the general idea and be able to customize it for your needs. In particular, it assumes that you're on a Unix system; but, since Perl is readily available on almost all platforms, you should be able to tweak this to work for your particular situation relatively easily. Here's the code:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w

# Initialize index variable
$x = 0;

# Loop through all the files in the current directory
# and store their names in an array
foreach $file (`ls`) {
    $someArray[$x] = $file;
    $x++;
}

# Initialize the random function
srand;
# Get the random number (it's -1 because the array
# index starts at 0
$y = int(rand(@someArray) - 1);

# You should replace this line with whatever you'd
# like to do with the file; This line just prints
# out the name of the file.
print "The file is $someArray[$y]\n";

Well, I hope that does what you wanted it to do. Of course, we could make the program a lot more sophisticated (it could check for directories, for starters) and make it do more than just print the name of the file. But, it should work as a nice starting point for most purposes. If it doesn't, please feel free to write back to me.

Regards,

Rick.