Hello rad_144, and welcome to the Monastery!

For finding the longest common substring, see the thread finding longest common substring which I referenced in my recent post Re^13: partial match between 2 files.

Update (1^st January, 2013): After the comedy of errors documented in the updates to Re^13: partial match between 2 files, I finally came up with a solution using my own advice:

Hope that helps,

Thanks for the code snippets. It really helped.

You could use the File::Spec functions: spitpath & splitdir, to simplify your matching.

($volume,$directories,$file) = File::Spec->splitpath( $path );
@dirs = File::Spec->splitdir( $directories );
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then it's simple to compare the arrays to see how much they have in common.

here some code, it basically starts from the end and stops as soon as not all dirs are identical.

(can be done far more elegantly but lost interest ;-)

HTH, TIMTOWTDI!

use strict;
use warnings;

use Data::Dump qw(pp);

my @paths = map { [ split '/' ]  } qw[
        /home/instance/domains/abcd/xyz/1.txt
        /a1234/domains/abcd/xyz/1.txt
        /a1234/topfolder/instance/domains/abcd/xyz/1.txt
         ];
#pp @paths;

my $a_norm = shift @paths;

my @result;
 
dir_loop:
for my $idx ( 1 .. @$a_norm ) {
  for my $a_path (@paths){
    last dir_loop 
      if $a_norm->[-$idx] ne $a_path->[-$idx];
  } 
  unshift @result,$a_norm->[-$idx]
}
 
pp @result;
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output:

("domains", "abcd", "xyz", "1.txt")
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Could you please elaborate how this work?

Could you please elaborate which part is unclear ?