People have already explained that regexp are different than shell matching.

If you're trying to get a list of files matching a file spec, use glob. Otherwise, you'll have to use a regexp.

If the pattern can be a regexp, the following will do fine:

if ($file =~ /\.txt\z/) {
   print("Match\n");
} else {
   print("No match\n");
}
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If you need must be a file spec, the following will convert (rudimentary, as in just * and ?) file specs into a regexp:

my $file_pattern = '.*';

my $re_pattern = '';

for ($file_pattern) {
   /\G \*       /gcx && do { $re_pattern .= '.*';            redo };
   /\G \?       /gcx && do { $re_pattern .= '.';             redo };
   /\G ([^*?]+) /gcx && do { $re_pattern .= quotemeta("$1"); redo };
}

my $re = qr/^$re_pattern\z/;

if ($file =~ $re) {
   print("Match\n");
} else {
   print("No match\n");
}
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Don't forget that regexps are case-sensitive by default. Use /\.txt\z/i (first snippet) or qr/^$re_pattern\z/i (second snippet) to make the match case-insensitive.

* and . have special meaning within regexes. If the string you're passing as a pattern into your regular expression contains an asterisk, that is going to be interpreted as a quantifier. And '.' is interpreted to mean "any character except newline".

You could probably do it like this:

if ( $file =~ m/\Q$file_pattern\E$/ ) { # .......
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Also note the '$' which anchors the match to the righthand side of the filename. Otherwise, you might find yourself matching "filename.txt.xml" on accident.

That doesn't seem to work...well, it works, but returns no files. Here is my test code:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use Cwd;
use File::Find;
my $file_pattern  ="*.txt";
find(\&d, cwd);
sub d {
  my $file = $File::Find::name;
  return unless -f $file;
  return  unless $file =~ /\Q$file_pattern\E$/;
  print "text file:$file\n";
}
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I didn't know what you were doing, but now I get it.

The * character is not a wildcard in Perl. That's a shell wildcard. You cannot expect a regular expression to recognize shell-style wildcards; they're different "languages".




Dave

my $file =~ /\.txt$/;

This regex ensures that the txt falls at the end of the filename and is preceded by a '.'.

use File::Basename;
($name,$path,$suffix) = fileparse($fullname,@suffixlist);
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