A directory exists with a total of 2,153,425 items (according to Windows folder Properties). It contains .jpg and .gif image files located within a few subdirectories. The task was to move the images into a different location while querying each file's name to retrieve some relevant info and store it elsewhere.

The script that used File::Find finished at 20462 files. Out of curiosity I wrote a tiny recursive function to count the items which returned a count of 1,734,802. I suppose the difference can be accounted for by the fact that it didn't count folders, only files that passed the -f test.

The problem itself can be solved differently by querying for file names first instead of traversing the directory. I'm just wondering what could've caused File::Find to finish at a small fraction of all files.

The data is stored on an NTFS file system.

Here is the meat of the script; I don't think including DBI stuff would be relevant since I reran the script with nothing but a counter in process_img() which returned the same number.

find(\&process_img, $path_from);

sub process_img {
    eval {
        return if ($_ eq "." or $_ eq "..");

        ## Omitted querying and composing new paths for brevity.

        make_path("$path_to\\img\\$dir_area\\$dir_address\\$type");
        copy($File::Find::name, "$path_to\\img\\$dir_area\\$dir_address\\$type\\$new_name");
    };
    if ($@) { print STDERR "eval barks: $@\n"; return }
}

And here is another method I used to count files:

count_images($path_from);
sub count_images {
    my $path = shift;

    opendir my $images, $path or die "died opening $path";
    while (my $item = readdir $images) {
        next if $item eq '.' or $item eq '..';
        $img_counter++ && next if -f "$path/$item";
        count_images("$path/$item") if -d "$path/$item";
    }
    closedir $images or die "died closing $path";
}

print $img_counter;