Dear Monks

I'm trying to use Perl's glob against a Windows network (i.e. UNC) path, where the first part of that path is held in a variable. I want to cater for cases where the part of the path held in the variable may contain whitespace, so I add the protection of an extra layer of quotes around it:

my $dir = '//datastore/genexternal/aoi';
print glob "'$dir/*'";
[download]

This simply doesn't work: it prints nothing. I get the same results in both Strawberry Perl and Active State Perl, running on Windows XP or Windows 7. I get these results in Active State Perl 5.10.1, running on either Windows XP or Windows 7.

It also does not work if:

• I try the long UNC notation (I'm no expert, I just found it on Wikipedia), as in my $dir = '//?/UNC/datastore/genexternal/aoi';
• I try a drive mapping for the UNC path, as in my $dir = 'G:/aoi';

I get the same results if I try switching the slash characters to backslashes.

By contrast, each of the following does work:

• Getting rid of the inner pair of single quotes, as in print glob "$dir/*"; - but then I lose the protection against whitespace.
• Listing the files of a local drive, rather than a UNC path, as in my $dir = 'C:/Program Files';
• Running this in Linux, against a mount of a Samba share of the network path, as in my $dir = '/genexternal/aoi';

Do you have any idea why it should fail for my UNC path?

Ed

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