-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

I didn't vote you down, but I can see perhaps why someone did. Isn't your reply incorrect? For example, if I write the following:


@vals = (".","..",".\n","..\n","foo","foo\n","bar","bar\n");

foreach (grep !/^[.]{1,2}$/,@vals) {
  print "$_\n";
}
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It spits out:


foo
foo

bar
bar
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...as I would expect. It filtered out ".\n" and "..\n" just fine. Can you elaborate?

..\n is a valid, albeit very bizarre, file name. This regex would incorrectly filter them out. I believe a more correct solution is to say /\.\.?\z/ \z is a zero width assertion that is true when you are at the actual end of the line as opposed to $, which anchors to the end of the line or possibly \n and the end of the line.

mikfire

Ahh, the problem is that it filters those out when it shouldn't. Sorry, reversed logic strikes. In other words,

/^\.$/
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matches both dot and dot-newline, and if you were expecting it to match only dot, you could be in for a big shock.

I've edited the original note to reflect what I meant, not what I said. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

@filtered_directory = grep { $_ ne '.' && $_ ne '..' } @directory
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