Am I nuts?

I was writing a little sub that returned a list of files, given a particular file spec. It had to work in windows and unix. Sometimes wild cards are passed, sometimes not.

So... I used glob (not the actual code below, but the basic idea).

sub Get_File_List {
  my $pat = shift;
  return glob ($pat);
}


sub my_other_sub {

  my $file = shift;

  # --- maybe file has wildcards?  Define array
  #     to hold all files
  my @files = Get_File_List($file);

  # do stuff with @files
}
[download]

Problem #1
If there are blanks in the file names, the array that is returned from Get_File_List will hold each part of the file name in a different array element...
i.e. input file name = "my dos file.txt"
gives  $file[0]="my", $file[1]="dos" ... etc.

So I added code to my Get_File_List to handle the cases where the file names have spaces.
Merrily I go along, expecting that if the file spec does not find a file that matches, Get_File_List will return a null array. No such luck. Glob behaviour is shown below.

Imagine I have a directory with absolutely no files *.txt

> perl -e 'print "result: <",glob("*.txt"),">\n";'
result: <>
> perl -e 'print "result: <",glob("xx.txt"),">\n";'
result: <xx.txt>
> dir > x.txt
> perl -e 'print "result: <",glob("x.txt"),">\n";'
result: <x.txt>
> perl -e 'print "result: <",glob("*.txt"),">\n";'
result: <x.txt>
> perl -e 'print "result: <",glob("xx.txt"),">\n";'
result: <xx.txt>
> dir xx.txt
xx.txt: No such file or directory
[download]

Is this the normal behaviour of glob?? It is not what I expected, and yes I did read the manual.

Maybe I should use readdir instead, and switch "*.txt" to ".*\.txt"??

Sandy

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