Webmaster Forum / Perl / Modules / April 2004

Seeking to practice the Perl virtue of laziness, I pose the following
problem and question:

My former ISP allocated me personal web space wherein every time I
created a new directory with an FTP program, the server automatically
created an index.html page for that directory.  This page refreshed
the links it indexed every time I created/deleted a file from a
particular directory.  The page was basic HTML -- no stylesheet, no
nuttin -- but it Just Worked.

My new ISP does *not* automatically generate an index.html page when I
upload/delete/rename files via FTP.  As a result, I cannot easily
browse through the directories in my web space; every link has to be
manually typed.

I would like to write a Perl script which provides File::Find-like
capabilities for traversing directory trees and modifying files found
therein with the power of FTP.  Specifically, I would like the script
to:

1.  Establish a connection with the FTP part of my ISP's service via
Net::FTP (with which I am somewhat familiar).
2.  Traverse the directory structure of my FTP site much as File::Find
would, with the objective of getting a complete picture of the
directory tree.
3.  On the fly, create index.html pages for each directory with links
to the parent directory (if public) and all files and subdirectories
found therein.
4.  Upload the new index.html pages to the appropriate directories via
Net::FTP, then log off.

I would be surprised if I were the first person to have/want to do
this.  I looked at the listings under FTP on search.cpan.org, but none
seemed to leap out and say, "I'm the one you want, baby."

Suggestions for avoidance of reinvention of wheels?  Thanks in
advance.

jimk