I am trying to parse a single file in a series of directories that is frequently updated and and renamed with a postfix according to the date. I do this by iterating through the directories and matching the files I want to parse with forced shell expansion inside calls to open open(FH,<*fpc>). It works the first time through and then fails. The <> returns undef but the files I am trying to parse do in fact exist. Does <> shell expansion only get compiled once -- is there a way to force it to evaluate every time. There are other ways to solve this problem but <> is the simplest/most elegant, if it only worked. 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w 

use strict;
#directory containing fpc map dirs
my $fpcdir = '/home3/ftp/pub/gsc1/fpc_files';
#organism/fpc map dir names
my @projects = ("mouse","human","cb","arab");
my %stats;
#foreach of the fpc maps get total clones and contigs
foreach(@projects)
{

    &get_clones_and_contigs($fpcdir,$_);
}

sub get_clones_and_contigs($$)
{
my ($fpcdir,$project) = @_; 
# this is what I can not figure out - 
#this works on the first iteration 
# but fails to expand correctly the second time
#&get_lones_and_contigs is called. 
 open(FH,<$fpcdir/$project/*fpc>) || die "$! \n";
    while(<FH>)
    {
    if ($_ =~ /\sContigs\s.(\d+)\s.Clones\s.(\d+)\s/)
    {
        print "$project: contigs[$1] clones[$2] \n";
        my @stats = ($1,$2);
        $stats{'project'} = \@stats;
        return;
    }
    }
    close FH;
}

[download]
below is one of an excerpt of one of the fpc files that needs parsing. 
// fpc project master_Humanmap
// 4.6.9  Date: 14:04 Wed 05 Dec 2001  User: scanner
// Contigs 726  Clones 407155  Markers 69507  Bands 12849811
// Framework Chr_Z  Genome 0  AvgBand 4000  AvgInsert 174000
// Configure 173 Tol 7 Cut 3e-09 Apx 0.100 Min 3 End 15 Kill -1 Bad 15
+ Best 10 Log 0 Std 1
// CpM Off 50 1 0 TBL 1 1e-05 2 1e-04 3 1e-03
// Build 1/1/70 0:0 Cut 3e-12 Off 50 1 0 TBL 1 1e-08 21e-07 3 1e-06
// Clip(0 4600) MinMax(0 32767) AutoRemark

[download]

Edit Masem 2002-01-24 - Fixed title, code tage on file format

In reply to Shell expansion with &lt;&gt; is funky by tommyboy

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