perl filenames and square brackets

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

here's the subroutine I have made to generate a recursive list (with path) of every file in a directory. My problem is that it hangs up on files with square brackets in the filename, and I don't know how to fix this.

sub recursive_filelist
{
    my $dir = $_[0];

    $dir .= '/' if($dir !~ /\/$/); 
    
    $dir .= '*';

    my @list = glob($dir);
    my @files;

    foreach my $variable (@list) 
    { 

    my $full = $path . $variable;

    if( -d $full) 
    { 
        my @morefiles = recursive_filelist($full);

        push(@files, @morefiles); 
    } 
    elsif (-f $full) 
    { 
        push(@files, $full);         
    } 
    
} 
return @files;
}
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20041118 Janitored by Corion: Changed PRE tags to CODE tags as per monastery convention

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Re: perl filenames and square brackets by Fletch (Bishop) on Nov 18, 2004 at 18:19 UTC
One, square brackets are significant to `glob` just as they are to most UNIX shells (e.g. `foo[abc]` meaning match any of the files fooa, foob, or fooc), so you'll need to escape them with backslashes. Two, see File::Find or File::Find::Rule rather than reinventing the wheel. Addendum: And you should test if something's a directory (see `-d` in `perldoc -f -X`) before trying to recurse down into it anyway.	[reply] [d/l] [select]
•Re^2: perl filenames and square brackets by merlyn (Sage) on Nov 18, 2004 at 18:22 UTC
Two, see File::Find or File::Find::Rule rather than reinventing the wheel. Or File::Finder. -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.	[reply]
Re: perl filenames and square brackets by etcshadow (Priest) on Nov 18, 2004 at 18:57 UTC
All above is correct. While you're better off, overall, changing the whole algorithm to using some File::Find variant, the simplest most direct solution to the problem, is to just replace the `glob` with an `opendir, readdir` combo. So, rather than: `$dir .= '*'; my @list = glob($dir);` [download] you could do: `opendir(DIR, $dir) or die $!; my @list = readdir(DIR) or die $!; closedir(DIR) or die $!;` [download] So that you're actually looking at the file contents, directly, rather than relying on globbing. `------------ :Wq Not an editor command: Wq` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: perl filenames and square brackets by jimbojones (Friar) on Nov 18, 2004 at 18:28 UTC
Hi Are the square-brackets in a directory name? When you recurse into that directory, I suspect glob will interprete the [] in the file path as a character class (I think), not as the path name. You would need to escape. However, you're better off using a module for this. File::Find is a good place to start, although it's a bit weird in its calling convention. The following node details why this type of recursion can be a bad thing: 18101, and also details how things can go back and forth here in the Monastery {grin} - j	[reply]