in reply to Glob filespec

glob plainly emulates shell globbing, and does not work with regexen. You can either use File::Find (or its relatives File::Find::Rule and File::Finder) even if you do not need to recurse, or just opendir, readdir and grep on filenames yourself.

Or else, now that I think of it, shouldn't *_{process,read}[+_]* work? Well, not exactly, because it would give false positives if "+" were not the first one. Maybe it's enough for you, anyway...

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Re^2: Glob filespec
by bangers (Pilgrim) on May 03, 2006 at 16:19 UTC
    Thanks for your suggestions. Unfortunately File::File etc won’t work as we don’t want to change several 1,000 file specs ( sorry if some of the restriction seem arbitrary, but there are good reasons for them)

    In the end we decided to use the file spec to pull back a super set of what we wanted. We then converted any '*' into '(.*?)' and did a regex. If $1 contains a '+' then we exclude the file e.g. 
    my $spec = ‘*_{process,read}_*’;

my $reg = $spec;
$reg =~ s/\*/(.*?)/g;

my @use;
for my $file ( glob $spec )  {
    $file = m/$reg/;
    push @use, $file unless $1 =~ /\+/;
}

    [download]
    Note: That’s a simplification of the code, which works, I haven’t tested or run the code above. It’s just for illustration here.

    I suppose in the end it was a PERL question after all.
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      Thanks for your suggestions. Unfortunately File::File etc won’t work as we don’t want to change several 1,000 file specs ( sorry if some of the restriction seem arbitrary, but there are good reasons for them)

      To be fair I don't understand your concerns since I don't have the slightest idea about what you mean with "to change several 1,000 file specs". I suspect that you, in turn, did misunderstood the suggestion about File::Find.

      my $spec = ‘*_{process,read}_*’;

      [download]

      Please use real single quotes: what are you using as an editor?!?

      my @use;
for my $file ( glob $spec )  {
    $file = m/$reg/;
    push @use, $file unless $1 =~ /\+/;
}

      [download]

      This won't work, since since {process,read} does not do what you seem to think it does, in a regex. You probably want

      my @use=grep !/[^+]*?_(?:process|read)_/, glob $spec;

      [download]

      But then you should be aware that you're duplicating your efforts, performing two very similar pattern matches one after the other. Although I'm a big advocate of glob whereas I often see people do unnecessary opendirs and readdirs, in this case I feel like suggesting you to follow that path...

      I suppose in the end it was a PERL question after all.

      No, it was not a "PERL" question, since there's not such a thing. Check

      perldoc -q 'difference between "perl" and "Perl"'

      [download]

      and while you're there, PERL as shibboleth and the Perl community.

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