perl glob

[Anonymous Monk]

Hi monks,

I have just wrote a converter and a simple wrapper that allows to convert all the files with the same extension in one go. The wrapper code as follows:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $input = shift;

my @files;
if ($input =~ /^\./) {
    @files = glob "*$input";
}
else {
    @files = $input;
}

foreach (@files) {
    print "$_\n";
    system("perl converter.pl $_");
}

It can read commands like:

perl wrapper.pl .ws

Now I want to make the wrapper more powerful such that it can also read something like:

perl wrapper.pl test_*.ws

That means all files with name test_xxx.ws should be converted. How can I realize that?

Thanks a lot for your kind help.

[talexb]

Normally this globbing would be handled by the shell, so your two commands would be

perl wrapper.pl *.ws

and

perl wrapper.pl test_*.ws

Leaving your script to work its way through @ARGV and process files.

To make it even simpler, you could just replace wrapper.pl with converter.pl, unless the wrapper script is doing something that you haven't shown here.

[Anonymous Monk]

Sorry for my poor english...

The converter.pl is an other long programm which I have wrote for converting scripts in one programming language to the scripts in an other. But with converter.pl I can only convert one file in one go. E.g.:

perl converter.pl abc.ws

It will create a new script names abc.is. So I wrote this simple wrapper, to allow me converting several ws files in one go. E.g.:

perl wrapper.pl .ws

For instance, it converts abc.ws, efg.ws and hij.ws in one go, which I can't achieve with:

perl converter.pl .ws.

P.S.

perl converter.pl *.ws

also didn't work, probably because I also allowed users to define the output filename by themselves, e.g.:

perl converter.pl abc.ws efg.is

And here is the relevant codes in converter.pl:

my $file_name = "";
if (scalar(@ARGV) == 2){
    $file_name .= $ARGV[1];
} else {
    $ARGV[0] =~ s/(.+)\.\S+/$1/;
    $file_name .= $ARGV[0];
    $file_name .= ".is";
}

I checked here whether the user defined a name for the "is" file, if not the "is" file will take the same name with the "ws" file.

Many thanks!

[hdb]

Under Windows, the "shell" would not expand the wildcard, but then you can simply use:

my @files = glob $input;

[Anonymous Monk]

Thanks dude! That works!

[afoken]

Even better: Win32::Autoglob handles globbing transparently.

(Note that it does not handle globbing correctly on OS/2 and DOS, and you better don't set an environment variable named SHELL on Windows or else it will assume running under cygwin.)

Alexander

[Eily]

Instead of system "perl converter.pl $_" you could use do. If you could rewrite converter.pl to work on $_ you could replace your loop with do "converter.pl" for @files. Or even better if converter.pl can work on all arguments:

{
    local @ARGV = @files;
    do "converter.pl";
}

And if you don't want to rewrite converter.pl :

foreach (@files)
{
   local @ARGV = $_;
   do "converter.pl";
}

[hippo]

It's not clear to me from what you have said why you don't just let the shell handle the expansion.