file globbing heck

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

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

Comment on file globbing heck Select or Download Code

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: file globbing heck by belg4mit (Prior) on May 03, 2002 at 20:58 UTC
I'd chdir first and avoid the whole problem. It also gets you a smaller result set back. I'd also use glob, because it's prettier. `-- perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"`	[reply]
Re: file globbing heck by Fastolfe (Vicar) on May 04, 2002 at 17:02 UTC
Escape your spaces with a backslash (`s/\s/\\ /g` should do it). `$dir = 'c:/some/directory\ with\ spaces'; @xlfiles = glob("$dir/*.xls");` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]