comment on

Greetings Monkdom,

I'm running into some weirdness when trying to glob files when the directory name has spaces. This is on Win NT or 2000 running 5.6.1 build 631.

## case 1, with spaces in dir name
my $dir = 'C:/foo/bar baz/';
## this works ok
my @xlfiles = <"$dir*.xls">;

## case 2, no spaces in dir name
$dir = 'C:/foo/bar_baz/';
## this does not work...
@xlfiles = <"$dir*.xls">;
## but this does...
@xlfiles = <$dir*.xls>;
[download]

So my question is, what is the proper way to glob assuming that you may or may not have spaces in a directory file name? I've also tried all combinations of the glob operator with no luck...

glob("$dir*.xls") acts like <$dir*.xls>

Currently, I test for the presence of spaces and select the format that works with either case 1 or case 2, like this...

if ( "$dir" =~ /.*\s+.*/ ) {
   @xlfiles = <"$dir*.xls">;
} else {
   @xlfiles = <$dir*.xls>;
}
[download]

but this seems kind of Harkonian. Any suggestions?

Regards, chinman

In reply to file globbing heck by chinman

Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
<code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.


Keep It Simple, Stupid
	PerlMonks