Hi, (this was also posted on nntp.perl.beginners, but I don't expect an answer there). I'm just stumped by this one. It all started when I was trying to work out a backup method of backing up all subdirs of /home/user as individual tarballs. So I wanted to copy everything from the user's top level directory to a temporary backup directory. This included all hidden files, hidden directories, and plain files in /home/user. Well, I did some testing as myself, and all seemed to be going well, then I moved the script to /, and see what happens when root ran it. Things went wrong, root runs the same file from /, and it misses plain files like /home/user/sig. I made a little test case to demonstrate the problem.
The following script is run by root in /home/user: /home/zentara/backup-homex ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w

@users=('/home/zentara');

#put all user-root hidden files and hidden dirs into 1 temp dir
#this makes it easier to backup second level subdirs
foreach $homedir(@users){
opendir DIR, $homedir or warn "Cannot readdir $homedir:$!\n";
@files = grep !/^\.\.?$/, readdir DIR;
foreach (@files){push @movem,$_ if -f}
foreach (@files){push @movem,$_ if ($_ =~ m!^[.]!)}
print "@movem\n";
print "##############################################\n";
}
exit;

[download]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When the above script is run as user or as root in /home/zentara the output is good: 
x z z1 zz sig sig1 sig2 sigs wxyz .Xmodmap sig.perl .bashrc .fvwm2rc
.bash_history backup-homex .Xdefaults .Xauthority .profile .Xresources
dontfeedtrolls .xinitrc wxyz-root .kc .le .mc .qt .ddd .kde .pan .pfm
.ssh .netscape .designer .babygimp .gftp .gimv .fvwm .java .kde2 .sane
.skel .ssh2 .vifm .wine .xmms .Xmodmap .tkalbum .bashrc .gnome2_private
.tkphone .dosemu .mozilla .gconfd .gnome2 .gphoto .gqview .glabels
.gkrellm .fvwm2rc .acrobat .gnucash .gimp-1.2 .pgaccess .regexp
.ptknotes .nautilus .bash_history .mhwaveedit .glameswap .autozen
.kalyptus .antiword .Xdefaults .gnome-desktop .Xauthority .profile
.jpi_cache .gnome_private .Xresources .xinitrc .pornview .adobe .cedit
.dillo .gconf .foxrc .gnome .gnupg .gtklp .links .tkfax .sweep
.cddbslave .roadmap .rolodex .sylpheed .TinyCA .emacs.d .wine.bak
##############################################
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When the above script is run by root from /, the output misses some plain files, notably sig, but many are missing, seemingly random: 
wxyz backup-homex .kc .le .mc .qt .ddd .kde .pan .pfm .ssh .netscape
.designer .babygimp .gftp .gimv .fvwm .java .kde2 .sane .skel .ssh2
.vifm .wine .xmms .Xmodmap .tkalbum .bashrc .gnome2_private .tkphone
.dosemu .mozilla .gconfd .gnome2 .gphoto .gqview .glabels .gkrellm
.fvwm2rc .acrobat .gnucash .gimp-1.2 .pgaccess .regexp .ptknotes
.nautilus .bash_history .mhwaveedit .glameswap .autozen .kalyptus
.antiword .Xdefaults .gnome-desktop .Xauthority .profile .jpi_cache
.gnome_private .Xresources .xinitrc .pornview .adobe .cedit .dillo
.gconf .foxrc .gnome .gnupg .gtklp .links .tkfax .sweep .cddbslave
.roadmap .rolodex .sylpheed .TinyCA .emacs.d .wine.bak
##############################################
Can someone shed some light on why this happens? It has something to do with running it from /. I have got around it by chdiring to /home/user to let root run the script from there, but I really would like to know what is going on. Thanks.

In reply to losing files when run from / by zentara

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