Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi monks,

I have just wrote a converter and a simple wrapper that allows to convert all the files with the same extension in one go. The wrapper code as follows: 

use warnings;
use strict;

my $input = shift;

my @files;
if ($input =~ /^\./) {
    @files = glob "*$input";
}
else {
    @files = $input;
}

foreach (@files) {
    print "$_\n";
    system("perl converter.pl $_");
}

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It can read commands like:

perl wrapper.pl .ws

Now I want to make the wrapper more powerful such that it can also read something like:

perl wrapper.pl test_*.ws

That means all files with name test_xxx.ws should be converted. How can I realize that?

Thanks a lot for your kind help.

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: perl glob
by talexb (Chancellor) on Nov 07, 2013 at 13:58 UTC

    Normally this globbing would be handled by the shell, so your two commands would be 

    perl wrapper.pl *.ws

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    and 
    perl wrapper.pl test_*.ws

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    Leaving your script to work its way through @ARGV and process files.

    To make it even simpler, you could just replace wrapper.pl with converter.pl, unless the wrapper script is doing something that you haven't shown here.

    Alex / talexb / Toronto

    Thanks PJ. We owe you so much. Groklaw -- RIP -- 2003 to 2013.

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      Sorry for my poor english...

      The converter.pl is an other long programm which I have wrote for converting scripts in one programming language to the scripts in an other. But with converter.pl I can only convert one file in one go. E.g.:

      perl converter.pl abc.ws

      It will create a new script names abc.is. So I wrote this simple wrapper, to allow me converting several ws files in one go. E.g.:

      perl wrapper.pl .ws

      For instance, it converts abc.ws, efg.ws and hij.ws in one go, which I can't achieve with:

      perl converter.pl .ws.

      P.S.

      perl converter.pl *.ws

      also didn't work, probably because I also allowed users to define the output filename by themselves, e.g.:

      perl converter.pl abc.ws efg.is

      And here is the relevant codes in converter.pl:

      my $file_name = "";
if (scalar(@ARGV) == 2){
    $file_name .= $ARGV[1];
} else {
    $ARGV[0] =~ s/(.+)\.\S+/$1/;
    $file_name .= $ARGV[0];
    $file_name .= ".is";
}

      [download]

      I checked here whether the user defined a name for the "is" file, if not the "is" file will take the same name with the "ws" file.

      Many thanks!

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Re: perl glob
by hdb (Monsignor) on Nov 07, 2013 at 14:23 UTC

    Under Windows, the "shell" would not expand the wildcard, but then you can simply use: 

    my @files = glob $input;

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      Thanks dude! That works!

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      Even better: Win32::Autoglob handles globbing transparently.

      (Note that it does not handle globbing correctly on OS/2 and DOS, and you better don't set an environment variable named SHELL on Windows or else it will assume running under cygwin.)

      Alexander

      --
      Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)
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Re: perl glob
by Eily (Monsignor) on Nov 07, 2013 at 14:45 UTC

    Instead of system "perl converter.pl $_" you could use do. If you could rewrite converter.pl to work on $_ you could replace your loop with do "converter.pl" for @files. Or even better if converter.pl can work on all arguments: 

    {
    local @ARGV = @files;
    do "converter.pl";
}

    [download]

    And if you don't want to rewrite converter.pl : 

    foreach (@files)
{
   local @ARGV = $_;
   do "converter.pl";
}

    [download]

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Re: perl glob
by hippo (Archbishop) on Nov 07, 2013 at 13:58 UTC

    It's not clear to me from what you have said why you don't just let the shell handle the expansion.

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