NAME CPAN::Checksums - Write a CHECKSUMS file for a directory as on CPAN SYNOPSIS use CPAN::Checksums qw(updatedir); my $success = updatedir($directory); INCOMPATIBILITY ALERT Since version 1.0 the generation of the attribute "shortname" is turned off by default. It was too slow and was not used as far as I know, and above all, it could fail on large directories. The shortname feature can still be turned on by setting the global variable $TRY_SHORTNAME to a true value. DESCRIPTION updatedir takes a directory name as argument and writes a typical CHECKSUMS file in that directory as used on CPAN unless a previously written CHECKSUMS file is there that is still valid. Returns 2 if a new CHECKSUMS file has been written, 1 if a valid CHECKSUMS file is already there, otherwise dies. Please note, that CPAN CHECKSUMS files ignore filenames matching "/readme$/i". Setting the global variable $CAUTION causes updatedir() to report changes of files in the attributes "size", "mtime", "md5", or "md5-ungz" to STDERR. By setting the global variable $TRY_SHORTNAME to a true value, you can tell updatedir() to include an attribute "shortname" in the resulting hash that is 8.3-compatible. Please note, that updatedir() in this case may be slow and may even fail on large directories, because it will always only try 1000 iterations to find a name that is not yet taken and then give up. PREREQUISITES DirHandle, IO::File, Digest::MD5, Compress::Zlib, File::Spec, Data::Dumper, Data::Compare AUTHOR Andreas Koenig, andreas.koenig@anima.de SEE ALSO perl(1).