Replacing specified files with actual files using map glob

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

Hi,

I'm trying to write a piece of code that will replace the contents of @ARGV with actual valid files which exist in a certain directory. I need to allow for wildcards ('*' only), spaces in file names and when a user specifies a directory I need to include the contents of that directory.

This is what I have so far:

use File::Find::Rule;
my $root_in = "E:/PGPTool/dept/AIS/dropbox";

aprint "Before:\n";
foreach (@ARGV) {
   print "$_\n";
}   

# replace wildcards and directories in @ARGV with actual files/folders
@ARGV = map glob ("$root_in/$_"), @ARGV;
eval { @ARGV = find (file => in => \@ARGV) };
foreach (@ARGV) { $_ =~ s/($root_in\/)(.+)/$2/; }

print "\nAfter:\n";
foreach (@ARGV) {
   print "$_\n";
}
[download]

The only problem is it won't work for files with spaces in the name - the '@ARGV = map glob ...' line uses the space as a delimiter and assumes eg 'file1 .txt' is refering to two files : 'file1' and '.txt'.

I tried inserting apostrophes :

glob ("'$root_in/$_'"), @ARGV;
[download]

which fixes the problem, but brakes it for files which do not contain spaces.

Anyone any ideas on how to fix this?

Thanks,
A

Comment on Replacing specified files with actual files using map glob Select or Download Code

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Re: Replacing specified files with actual files using map glob (modules) by tye (Sage) on Apr 06, 2004 at 15:59 UTC
"perldoc File::Glob" and "perldoc File::DosGlob" both document how to deal with spaces. From File::Glob's documentation: Since v5.6.0, Perl's CORE::glob() is implemented in terms of bsd_glob(). Note that they don't share the same prototype--CORE::glob() only accepts a single argument. Due to historical reasons, CORE::glob() will also split its argument on whitespace, treating it as multiple patterns, whereas bsd_glob() considers them as one pattern. so you could `use File::Glob qw( bsd_glob );` and replace your calls to glob() with calls to bsd_glob(). From the documentation for File::DosGlob: Spaces in the argument delimit distinct patterns, so `glob('.exe .dll')' globs all filenames that end in `.exe' or `.dll'. If you want to put in literal spaces in the glob pattern, you can escape them with either double quotes, or backslashes. e.g. `glob('c:/"Program Files"//.dll')', or `glob('c:/Program\ Files//.dll')'. The argument is tokenized using `Text::ParseWords::parse_line()', so see the Text::ParseWords manpage for details of the quoting rules used. - tye	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Replacing specified files with actual files using map glob by Anonymous Monk on Apr 06, 2004 at 17:05 UTC
Think I've got this figured out : if I escape the spaces before doing the '@ARGV = map glob ...' line, the code picks them up OK. Thanks anyway, A	[reply]