But I would like to pass all the below files only; j*.1.txt j*.3.txt j*.a.txt etc..

These examples all have only 1 character between the dots. If you just want that then you can amend the glob to look for that:

my @files = <data/j*.?.txt>;
[download]

OTOH, if you want to pass arbitrary globbing patterns you could do that in @ARGV but you'll need to quote them on invocation.

#!/usr/bin/env perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my @files = <data/j*.*.txt>;
if (@ARGV) {
    @files = map { <data/$_> } @ARGV;
}   
        
print "Using @files";
[download]

$ ./gt.pl 
Found data/j.a.txt data/j.foo.txt data/j.xyz.txt
$ ./gt.pl 'j*.?.txt'
Using j*.?.txt instead
Found data/j.a.txt
[download]

See map for more on its usage.

What if the file names are different.. something like /data/j*.1.txt /data/j*.txt /data/q*.1.txt etc..!! Please let me know.. Thank you in advance..

Well then you would pass them as separate args:

$ ./gt.pl 'j*.1.txt' 'j*.txt' 'q*.1.txt'
[download]

Obviously the first argument here is redundant as it is a subset of the second.

---

🦛

my @files=<data/j*.[13a].txt>;
[download]

Nice. I didn't expect that to work, but it does. I couldn't find any spec on what is allowed in the glob syntax, all I knew for sure was * and ?. I didn't know about a character set. Learned something new - thanks.

You may find File::Find helps clean up the logic:

use strict;
use warnings;
use File::Find;

my @matches = (qr(.*\.pl$), qr(.*\.pm$));

find(sub{wanted ($_, @matches)}, '.');


sub wanted {
    my ($name, @m) = @_;

    print "$File::Find::name\n" if grep {$name =~ /$_/} @m;
}
[download]

Prints (on my system - your results will be different):

./noname1.pl
./noname1.pm
./noname2.pl
./noname2.pm
./SortaIniParser.pm
./StarTrek.pl
./Win32/FileVersionInfo.pm
./Win32/PEFile.pm
[download]

You can replace the grep {$name =~ /$_/} @m test with whatever suits your purpose.

Thank you for the reply. How to pass location of the files in the above code? For example: I have all the files in /data/test/ location. Also, I have almost 30 unique file formats/types to search. In your example you have specified only 2, is there a limit of how many file formats I can pass?

It's considered polite to inform about crossposting, so that people not attending both sites don't waste their efforts hacking a problem that has already been solved at the other end of the internets.

clean it up with the perl function glob.

no