Long Directory Names

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

Fellow Perlish People,
I know this is a problem that's been conquered many times before, but the answer, at present, eludes me. I'm working on a Win2k box with Activestate Perl 5.6. Disk is NTFS format. I need to process all of the files in a directory. The directory name is very long and has spaces in it.
I have followed the recipes in the Cookbook, and they work as long as there are *no* spaces in the path. But when I have a path name like "d:\my documents\my other stuff\*.*" it fails.
Specifically, here is my code:

$thispath = 'd:\my documents\my other stuff\*.*';
print "thispath is [$thispath]\n";

@thisdir = glob($thispath);
foreach $thisfile (@thisdir) {
  print "    Found [$thisfile]\n";
}
[download]

And the output I get is:

thispath is [d:\my documents\my other stuff\*.*]
    Found [d:./my]
    Found [docsmy]
[download]

The actual directory has this:

12/11/2000  07:49p      <DIR>          .
12/11/2000  07:49p      <DIR>          ..
12/11/2000  07:42p                 480 dir.pl
12/11/2000  07:52p                 185 dir2.pl
12/11/2000  07:53p                   0 out.txt
12/11/2000  11:00a               1,125 populate.pl
[download]

However, if I replace the full path with ".\*.*", I get this:

thispath is [.\*.*]
    Found [.\dir.pl]
    Found [.\dir2.pl]
    Found [.\out.txt]
    Found [.\populate.pl]
[download]

I can't seem to find anything on CPAN for this, though I know there must be something somewhere. FYI: I've also tried using opendir, as suggested in another article on this site. Is this a problem with Globbing, or with how the file names are stored in the list?
Any random thoughts? Any specific ones?
Much Thanks.
--Mark

Comment on Long Directory Names Select or Download Code

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Re: Long Directory Names by clemburg (Curate) on Dec 12, 2000 at 15:48 UTC
If you use the `glob()` function on Windows, you need to use File::DosGlob - otherwise globbing won't work the way you expect it to work. This also applies to hidden uses of `glob()` with the angle operator, like `@files = <.>;`. Christian Lemburg Brainbench MVP for Perl http://www.brainbench.com	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Long Directory Names by myocom (Deacon) on Dec 12, 2000 at 09:35 UTC
I might suggest using readdir for something like this. The following snippet should get you started... `my $path='d:\my documents\my other stuff'; opendir (DIR, $path) \|\| die "Couldn't open $path: $!\n"; my @files=readdir (DIR); # Slurp! print join("\n",@files); closedir (DIR);` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Long Directory Names by zzspectrez (Hermit) on Dec 12, 2000 at 12:20 UTC
How about something like this... `#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my $thispath = 'c:\Documents and Settings\bch\My Documents\mp3s\\'; print "PATH: $thispath"; chdir ($thispath); my @files = <.>; map { print "FOUND: $_\n"; } @files;` [download] Here is my output on my Win2K machine. `FOUND: Liquid Soul - 03 - Salt Peanuts-Chocolate Covered Nut.mp3 FOUND: Liquid Soul - 10 - No Cents.mp3 FOUND: Ronny Jordan feat Mos Def - A Brighter Day (remix).mp3` [download] Hope this helps.. zzSPECTREz	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Long Directory Names by repson (Chaplain) on Dec 12, 2000 at 12:25 UTC
You might also be interested in looking at the File:: series of modules. Several come with Activestate which may be of use. File::Spec is supposed to do lots of thing portably, but I didn't see what you wanted there so File::Glob may work better. Or better yet just use `opendir(FOO,$dirname); @files = readdir(FOO); closedir(FOO);`	[reply] [d/l]