sortable directories

Let's say that you have generated directories full of images from some app like Pure Data. This is pretty basic stuff but easy to forget.

Basically - files with names in a format like file001.jpg, file002.jpg...

In PD, simply provide an sprintf-style argument like: "/file/path/frame%03d.jpg" to the 'makefilename' object. Magic.

opendir DIR, $inPath or die "cannot access $inPath\n";
@imageFilenames = sort(grep{$_ ne '.' && $_ ne '..'} readdir DIR);
closedir DIR;

Without the sort function above, the order of filenames in @imageFilenames will be farily random. That's no good if you want to maybe run through a time series of image.

You may want to append the full path to each filename entry:

my ($i, $z) = (0,0);
foreach $z (@imageFilenames) {
$imageFilenames[$i] = join("", ($inPath, $z));
print "$imageFilenames[$i] \n";
$i++;
}

To shuffle this sorted array:

use List::Util 'shuffle'; # requires Perl 5.8 or later

my @shuffledFilenames = shuffle(@imageFilenames);

Or just omit the orginal sorting function perhaps.