I don't see an array?

Whoops forget a line - again this was just for simplicity

You can't modify a variable, but you should be able to create a new one

look into

reduce

, maybe that's what you need?

Ah yes the example looks very promising! Thanks. Will check it out later tonight

at one point in the past i remember reading that

anchor

resources existed, but they didn't seem to be documented very well. they just solved a sticky problem for me (with PE 2016.2 aka puppet 4.5.2), however if something changes and i am finally given the time to bring our code base kicking and screaming into the modern age ... do

anchor

resources still exist in the current versions of puppet?

i want to be sure i didn't just create a problem for my future self

Yes, but for compatibility only. https://www.puppet.com/docs/puppet/8/lang_containment.html and https://www.puppet.com/docs/puppet/8/lang_relationships.html#lang_relationships are the relevant documents,

contain

is probably what you're looking for now.

aside: i love google searches for puppet, always amusing results 😄

Anchor is part of stdlib and really hasn't had a meaningful non-documentation change since it was added 12 years ago: https://github.com/puppetlabs/puppetlabs-stdlib/commits/main/lib/puppet/type/anchor.rb So, it's as close to zero-maintenance overhead as a type could get. Removing it would cause a bunch of disruption in return for "savings" that essentially rounds to zero.

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Ok maybe I need to ask differently to get where I want to. I want to recursively check and create directories. So for a path of

/foo/bar/baz

I want to check whether

/foo

exists and if not create it and the same for all the other directories on that path. May idea was to use use the slice function and seperate the string by

/

and then do .each on each entry in the array that is created by the slice function. Now I tried

recude

but I either couldn't get the syntax right or this isn't what I'm looking for. Any ideas?

i would just declare

file

resources for

/foo

,

/foo/bar

, and

/foo/bar/baz

or are you starting with the full path and want to simulate what

mkdir -p

does, automatically create any missing parent directories?

Yup, basically that. The path is a variable and so I need to be able to go to any depth.

ah ... maybe something like this: (this is absolutely not tested)

$dir.split('/').reduce('') |$a,$n| {
    file { "${a}${n}" :
      ensure => directory ,
      owner  => 'root' ,
      group  => 'root' ,
      mode   => '0755' ,
    }

    "${a}${n}/"
  }

reduce()

is kind of a weird function to wrap your head around if you haven't seen it before, but once it "clicks" it's pretty awesome

one thing to watch out for, if the first character of

$dir

is a

/

, the

split()

will return an empty string as the first element, so the first iteration of

reduce()

would end up declaring an empty string as the filename, which might be ... less than ideal?

Yes I keep reading the docs over and over and try to build small examples but it hasn't clicked so far. But I will get there eventually 😄

Let me test this out

You were right heh

Error: Evaluation Error: Empty string title at 0. Title strings must have a length greater than zero.

Somehow I keep hitting this (see screenshot). I have tried various syntax but that's always where I end up sigh

@Moe What you also need to watch out for... and why this is usually a bad practice and is not recommended.... is: a) having puppet manage paths like

/foo

. Top level directories that don't necessarily belong to the things inside of it. For example

/etc

or

/opt

. b) duplicate resource declarations for all of the parent directories. c) improper permissions (owner, group, mode) for parent directories. C in particular is why Puppet doesn't implement a

mkdir -p

pattern. It's too ambiguous and unclear, which is bad/dangerous when using Puppet. Best practice in this case is to just explicitly create

file

resources for the directories you care about. A quick "i don't really care about the security implications of not defining permissions on parent directories" solution is to use an

exec

that calls

mkdir -p

.

edit: I have thought about it more and you are right. I have to keep thinking about this more and go another route.

The https://forge.puppet.com/modules/AlexCline/dirtree module helps with this.

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