Hi all,
a few notes on the replies

• GLOB_ERROR ... Of course I read the perldoc and I tried to use GLOB_ERROR. Unfortunately it is not set to a value other than zero when the globbing produced no result. When I introduce a print Dumper(GLOB_ERROR) after each call to bsd_glob it shows '0' in every case.
• $! is not reset ... Right, it would be quite counterintuitive if it were reset. That was a stupid assumption of mine. But then, why is it reset with $pat4 in the above example??
• As to chromatics question: Nah, I may be stupid but it's not that bad ;-) This is not real world code it's just me trying to boil the problem down to some small example. You are right, that I should have swapped the lines dumping the list and dumping $!

I am still trying to get this working. Any more pointers?

Following an old rule o' thumb: there must be something very dumb in my thinking or in my code, taking into account the amount of time I have already spent with this problem ;-)

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.