hi everyone :)

i am a newbie to perl. i just learn some basic of string filtering from perlintro. now i want to filter a string (which is a full pathname) to get a folder name. but i still cant get what i want. can anyone pls help me? below is my code: 
$a = "/home/a/ff.pl";

print "full path name is ", $a, "\n";

if ( $a =~ /^(\/home\/)(\S+).*$/ ) {
    print "\$1 = ", $1, "\n";    # output is  /home/
    print "\$2 = ", $2, "\n";    # output is  a/ff.pl

}

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how can i get the output "a"? i try this 
 if ($a =~ /^(\/home\/)(\W)(\S+).*$/)

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but cannot.

for your information, the pattern of the beginning part of the pathname will always be same, only the file name at the end will be different. sample input are: /home/a/ff.pl, /home/a/bb.pl, /home/b/cc.pl. that's all. thank you very much :)

regards,
hweefarn

update (broquaint): tidied up formatting + title change (was filter a string).

In reply to Matching part of a path by hweefarn

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