Re^2: Perfectly shuffling a deck of cards, over and over

So, why does glob work here when those files most likely don't exist on your system. Skimming through the glob and File::Glob docs it seems like glob should only return valid file names. Its a great trick, and it works for me under Windows. Just curious why?

Ted

Comment on Re^2: Perfectly shuffling a deck of cards, over and over

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Re^3: Perfectly shuffling a deck of cards, over and over by Enlil (Parson) on Jul 10, 2004 at 05:31 UTC
Like Mr. Muskrat mentioned above, the documentation for glob mentions: In list context, returns a (possibly empty) list of filename expansions on the value of EXPR such as the standard Unix shell /bin/csh would do So one needs to look to find what the documentation for /bin/csh says. If you search around the web for csh documentation who will come across a section on "filename substitution" (aka globbing). In short what this documentation says is that if it contains a `"*", "?","[", or "~"` then it an error not to have any files match. On the other hand it mentions nothing of "{". It also mentions that something like "a{b,c,d}e" is metanotation for a shorthand way of writing "abe ace ade" which is the trick played above with the `glob` function to get a list of possible combinations of card values and suits, i.e.,: `my @deck = glob "{2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,T,J,K,Q,A}{C,D,H,S}";` [download] HTH -enlil	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^3: Perfectly shuffling a deck of cards, over and over by Mr. Muskrat (Canon) on Jul 10, 2004 at 04:45 UTC
It's simple really. The glob documentation says that it performs filename expansion just like the standard Unix shell but it never says that it checks for those files to exist. It's only creating a list of possible filenames. It's up to you to figure out if they are there.	[reply]