in reply to Globbing drives me nuts - some things seem counterintuitive

Imagine I have a directory with absolutely no files *.txt 
> perl -e 'print "result: <",glob("*.txt"),">\n";'
result: <x.txt>

[download]
That's a bug. And it's something I can't reproduce.

Abigail

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Re: Re: Globbing drives me nuts - some things seem counterintuitive
by Sandy (Curate) on Apr 01, 2004 at 22:09 UTC
    Sorry Abigail

    If you look at all of the stuff, in between I made a file  dir >x.txt just to prove (to myself) that it actually worked when there was a file.

    What drives me nuts is it returns "xx.txt" if "xx.txt" was passed to the "glob" even if "xx.txt" does not exist.

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      What drives me nuts is it returns "xx.txt" if "xx.txt" was passed to the "glob" even if "xx.txt" does not exist.
      While that can be frustrating if it doesn't DWIM, I can think of a use for it. 
      foreach my $file_spec ( @ARGV )
{
  my @files = glob( $file_spec );
  foreach my $file ( @files ) 
  {
    if ( not(-e $file)
      and ( $file =~ /[.*]/ ) ) # change as appropriate
    {
      warn "Error: file $f doesn't exist,"
         . " or wildcard didn't match, " unless -e $file;
} } }

      [download]
      You might want to know which wildcard didn't match.

      -QM
      --
      Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of

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[d/l]

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