etcshadow has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Is there a good, cross-platform portable method or module for identifying pseudo directories like "." and ".."? I've done a good deal of looking around, and can't seem to find anything much.

About the best that I have come up with so far is a snippet from the latest version of File::Find off of CPAN which is basically like: 

$File::Find::skip_pattern    = qr/^\.{1,2}\z/;
if ($^O eq 'MacOS') {
    $File::Find::skip_pattern    = qr/^Icon\015\z/;
}

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Anyone know anything better/safer, or at least more canonical? 
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Re: Portable method for ignoring psuedo-files/psuedo-dirs?
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Mar 06, 2004 at 05:53 UTC

    Look at File::Spec's no_upwards(). There's an also updir(), but I don't see something like this_dir().

    Update: Oh yeah, curdir()!

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      There's a curdir() which will do what you want.

      My test code:

      use File::Spec;

my $f = 'File::Spec';

print $f->curdir, "\n";
print $f->updir, "\n";

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      My output:

      $ perl ./test_file_spec
.
..
$

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      There's also some notes on this in the perlport manpage ("Files and Filesystems" section).

      PN5

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      Thanks, no_upwards is exactly what I was looking for. I don't know how I missed it, considering that I looked through File::Spec several times, and am using it already for the other file-system-portable functions.

      Anyway, thanks. 

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