The Camel book is a bit scary describing performance of filename globbing with
the <*.pl> or the glob("*.pl") syntax with or without "use Cwd" in the
preamble. Portability is declared questionable.
I find that the only thing that works is <*> within a loop where each file is
tested by hand.
Consider this bit of doggerel. I'm looking for special cases of a *.pl file
that appears where * means the short name of the enclosing directory. Note
especially the "last" command in the second while loop. It works not! What
happens is that the second pass through the while() loop begins in the previous
directory at the point where it was cut short after finding the file I want. If
I comment out the last statement, so that all of the files in the directory are
processed, everything works.
my ($trial, $ddd, $lookfor, $error, $nextdir);
@thefolders = ();
@directories = ();
while ($trial = <*>)
{
if (-d $trial)
{
push @thefolders, $trial;
# print REPORT "$trial\n";
}
}
for $ddd (@thefolders)
{
$lookfor = "$ddd.pl";
$nextdir = "$mybase/$ddd"; # $mybase, global, is full path to initial
directory.
$error = chdir "$nextdir";
while (<*>)
{
if ($_ eq $lookfor)
{
push @directories, $ddd;
# print REPORT "Added directory $ddd, $lookfor in $ddd\n";
# last; # Fails. while() continues where it left off in the previous
pass
}
}
}
If I try finding <*.pl>, <$lookfor>, or glob("$lookfor") I get a real mess with
hits from directories that bear no resemblance to the most recent chdir which
returned without error.
Making the second while loop operate within the while looking for directories
is even worse.
I'll probably get around to looking more deeply but there's little point if
someone here knows that it's all a known problem on MacOS neXt. (10.3.9 here
because I need to talk to my SE/30 file server.) Oh It's perl 5.8.1-RC3.
--
Applescript syntax is like English spelling:
Roughly, though not thoroughly, thought through.
