file globbing heck

[chinman]

Greetings Monkdom,

I'm running into some weirdness when trying to glob files when the directory name has spaces. This is on Win NT or 2000 running 5.6.1 build 631.

## case 1, with spaces in dir name
my $dir = 'C:/foo/bar baz/';
## this works ok
my @xlfiles = <"$dir*.xls">;

## case 2, no spaces in dir name
$dir = 'C:/foo/bar_baz/';
## this does not work...
@xlfiles = <"$dir*.xls">;
## but this does...
@xlfiles = <$dir*.xls>;

So my question is, what is the proper way to glob assuming that you may or may not have spaces in a directory file name? I've also tried all combinations of the glob operator with no luck...

glob("$dir*.xls") acts like <$dir*.xls>

Currently, I test for the presence of spaces and select the format that works with either case 1 or case 2, like this...

if ( "$dir" =~ /.*\s+.*/ ) {
   @xlfiles = <"$dir*.xls">;
} else {
   @xlfiles = <$dir*.xls>;
}

but this seems kind of Harkonian. Any suggestions?

Regards, chinman

[belg4mit]

I'd chdir first and avoid the whole problem. It also gets you a smaller result set back.

I'd also use glob, because it's prettier.

--
perl -pew "s/\b;([mnst])/'$1/g"

[Fastolfe]

Escape your spaces with a backslash (s/\s/\\ /g should do it).

$dir = 'c:/some/directory\ with\ spaces';
@xlfiles = glob("$dir/*.xls");