OK, this may be a no-brainer to you but it's inflicted me with much gnashing of teeth...

Am coding to display directory contents on a HTML page and liked the look of File::Listing to parse the directory. My problem is that calling the parse_dir command doesn't work as I thought it would. The manual (un)helpfully provides only this to describe it's application:

parse_dir(`ls -l`)

But hey that's ok, I need to move up/down directory trees so I thought it'd be a doddle to change the function call thus:

my $dir = "/foo";
parse_dir("ls -l $dir")

Except it doesn't work!!!

even calling the function with single quotes i.e.parse_dir('ls -l') won't return.

I can get around it by calling a chdir() command prior to issuing the parse_dir call but i'm running under mod_perl so that just opens another can of worms...

What's with the back apostophe?! And how can I get around this with my teeth intact?...it's tarnishing my saintly demeanour!!

Paul

In reply to The Apostrophe According To St Paul by paulpi

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