perl -wE 'use Data::Dumper;print Dumper grep(@{[glob("$_/f*")]},("dir1
+", "dir2", "dir3"))'
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I just want to check that there is no need to explicitly check "if the list has at least one element" since presumably evaluating the list (by grep) will determine if it is empty or not.

Right, no need for an explicit check. Arrays in scalar context evaluate to the number of elements, so only empty arrays are false in boolean context.

The stateful carry over part seems to be weird if not buggy.

Well,

glob</b> needs to carry state for this useful idiom to work:

<code>
while (my $file = glob '*.txt') {
    # do something with $file
}
</code>

<p>Which is more friendly to memory than using a list and iterating th
+at.</p>

<p>But one could argue that <c>glob
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should discard its internal state when called with a different argument.
Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed

Thanks for the help and explanation!!!

This behavior is certainly not obvious and it is not (clearly) documented either under 'perldoc -f glob' or at perldoc.perl.org. The line saying "In scalar context, glob iterates through such filename expansions, returning undef when the list is exhausted" does not make it clear (at least to me) that such a state persists across calls to glob with a new argument! In fact, I can imagine all types of unintended errors when glob has been called in a scalar context in one place and then many lines later is called again in a different context and the programmer would have no idea that the state persists.

But then again I am not a Perl monk so these things are never obvious to me :)

I still think something is wrong...

If I do something like:

mkdir dir1 dir2
touch dir1/f{1,2}
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and then run:

foreach (1,2,3,4) {
print "dir1\n" if glob("dir1/f*");
print "dir2\n" if glob("dir2/f*");
}
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I get 'dir1' printed 3 times (NOT 4). But if I unwind the loop:

print "dir1\n" if glob("dir1/f*");
print "dir2\n" if glob("dir2/f*");
print "dir1\n" if glob("dir1/f*");
print "dir2\n" if glob("dir2/f*");
print "dir1\n" if glob("dir1/f*");
print "dir2\n" if glob("dir2/f*");
print "dir1\n" if glob("dir1/f*");
print "dir2\n" if glob("dir2/f*");
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Then I get 'dir1' printed 4 times!!!

In other words, I can understand why 'glob' is stateful when it is the loop iterator. But it makes no sense (to me) (and seems wrong) for it to be stateful when it is not the iterator. Because then unwinding a loop give a different answer.

> grep(@{[glob("$_/f*")]}

there are easier ways to count in list context,

grep { () = <$_/*> } <dir{1,2,3}>

(kind of a "half goatse" ;)

Cheers Rolf

Despite the admonition not to use <> for globbing?

So...list context on the left, which then creates an anonymous array, which array, when evaluated in boolean/scalar context, produces the length of the array?