| Zasinger 2005-08-02, 4:59 pm |
| Hello beginners,
I'm a bit lost: I just installed perl yesterday and so far
it seems to have massive and appealing potential, I can
hardly belive what I am seeing.
I'm very, very rusty in any sort of coding having been away
from it for over 15 years. I've been working at learning all
about 3d model making in that time.
I want to use Blitz3D to display some 3d representations of
weather. It can't get the data I s as far as I can tell,
but perl can it seems, and from what I've seen in 48 hours
it's very good at it indeed.
I'm now stuck:
I've so far got perl to use Net::FTP
I can get perl to log in to weather.noaa.gov and drill down
to /data/observations/metar/decoded
I can get single files from there if I know their names, but
I'd like to write a bit of code (which I am calling
freshen.plx at this point)
The idea is that it would freshen my local copy of that
directory, but only for files starting with "EG" for
example.
I'm thinking I need some way to do the equivalent of mget (I
think that is the regular ftp type command) and I'd like to
mget "EG*.TXT" as far as I can figure out.
I've no idea how I'd do the wild card bit, so far it hasn't
worked out as I'd hoped it might.
It seems that mget isn't implemented so I next thought that
a directory listing of that directory as a file might be a
good way to try next.
How might I do that?
I guess I could then pick lines off that file one line at a
time to get these files one at a time? Although I'm not at
all clear how I'd manage that bit just yet! ;O)
If anyone can help me figure this out I'd be really glad.
I've been working through some examples in "Beginning Perl"
and it's fairly slow going and rather dry reading in places
and some of it is a bit out of date too it would seem. I
think this is as a result of me having .8 and it being
written with .6 as the latest and greatest at the time, I
get the feeling some stuff has changed to this books
detriment perhaps. Mostly by scanning through some remarks
in the latest release notes (I think that was where I saw
them). I've no idea yet if it's trivial to patch up older
code so it would work once again.
Also I got that impatience thing going on too as I've waited
a couple of years to get at this thing, I'd started to feel
it was never going to happen but then perl happened to me,
making my wend into a minor bedlam!! ;O)
--
Best regards,
Zasinger mailto:Zasinger@pomf.net
|