in reply to Glob on Win32: porting 5.005 to 5.6

After a bit of experimentation it is the final . character at the end of your filename that is causing the problems. This . is lost by Windows even if you make files by that name with a trailing period char. I had to write my own _glob sub to prove that - it did not work either although it should have. Looking at the filenames from readdir demonstrated the problem. The lost . is the key. You do not really need it anyway as it will match with the * if it was there which it is not.

open F, ">C:/development/project/dev/-71.95_41.0528." or dir $!;close +F; open F, ">C:/development/project/dev/-71.95AAA_41.0528AAA." or dir $!; +close F; open F, ">C:/development/project/dev/-71.95BBB_41.0528BBB." or dir $!; +close F; open F, ">C:/development/project/dev/-71.95CCC_41.0528CCC." or dir $!; +close F; my $fname = "C:/development/project/dev/-71.95*_41.0528*."; my @list = glob($fname); print "I found " . scalar @list . " entries\n"; print "$_\n" for @list; # lose the . at the end - Windows does! my $fname = "C:/development/project/dev/-71.95*_41.0528*"; my @list = glob($fname); print "I found " . scalar @list . " entries\n"; print "$_\n" for @list; # this is how to roll your own glob but you don't need to!!! sub _glob { my($dir,$file) = shift =~ m!^(.*?)([^\\/]+)$!; opendir DIR, $dir or die $!; $file = quotemeta $file; $file =~ s/\\\*/.*/g; $file = qr/$file/; my @files = grep{/$file/}readdir DIR; closedir DIR; $_ = $dir.$_ for @files; return @files; } # here is the output, note the CHANGE to the filenames!!! # You can see we named the "file." but they end up being # called "file" That's Windows for you __END__ I found 0 entries I found 4 entries C:/development/project/dev/-71.95AAA_41.0528AAA C:/development/project/dev/-71.95BBB_41.0528BBB C:/development/project/dev/-71.95_41.0528 C:/development/project/dev/-71.95CCC_41.0528CCC

PS forward slashes / work fine as shown. Perl converts to Windows \ as required. Saves all the \\ stuff.

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

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Re: Re: Glob on Win32: porting 5.005 to 5.6
by perchance (Monk) on Sep 04, 2001 at 16:15 UTC
    I'm sorry about the dot at the end, it was one of the many variations on a theme we were trying out - it didn't have to be there, and so, wasn't the actual reason.
    However, your code helped me understand two things that were causing problems:
    • The \\ were not working properly. (I am not completely sure why, though).
    • There may have been conceptual problems with globbing on a relative path (probably in conjunction with the previous item), opening the directory implicitly.
    We replaced the \\s with /s and all is well.
    You have brought us great joy and peace,
    Thank you thank you thank you!

    perchance
    --- Me in Honey

      Glad you got it sorted. Perl's automagical conversion of / to \ for Win 32 is great. If you want to get Win32 type names for display to users you just do something like this:

      my $perl = '/foo/bar/baz'; (my $win = $perl) =~ tr!/!\\!; print "Perl still sees: $perl\n"; print "But we can print: $win\n";

      cheers

      tachyon

      s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

        Perl's automagical conversion of / to \ for Win 32 is great.

        Mostly FYI, Perl doesn't convert / to \ for Win32. Win32 itself accepts / as a path separator almost everywhere. Even command.exe accepts / as a path separator. But most tools from Microsoft that access file names on their command line don't allow / as a path separator (because they use / to introduce command-line options).

        Strangely, "open file" dialogues also don't accept / as a path separator, though I can find no reason why that should be (and this doesn't affect your Perl code unless you are stuffing fake keystrokes into a GUI with Perl, which is how I noticed this).

        Also, the Registry doesn't allow / as a key path separator because you can use / as part of a key name. Luckilly, Win32::TieRegistry deals with this rather well so Perl coders don't have to fret about it.

        So it is often best to use / as your directory path separator in Perl and convert / to \ if you need to hand the path to an external program on its command line.

                - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")