p5pRT
commented
13 years ago From jpl@research.att.com
Created by jpl@research.att.com
For background\, please visit http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=917494
A user there could not use the standard glob\, because a directory contained blanks. When he inserted
use File::Glob ':glob';
his
while (glob "$folder/*.txt")
looped forever. I initially argued this was not a bug\, because bsd_glob only promised to return a list\, and a list in scalar context just chucks all but the last entry\, which is "true" in this case. But as I tried to understand how to make it behave like CORE clob in scalar context\, I looked at ext/File-Glob/t/global.t\, and the tests there look like File::Glob is expected to behave exactly like core glob. (':glob' is not tested there).
At the very least\, the incompatible behavior of ':glob' in scalar context should be documented. Ideally\, it should be made to behave like core glob. But that means that anyone using ':glob' doing
$last_entry = glob($pattern);
to get just the last matching entry would start getting the first matching entry. So changing the behavior to be closer to the core *could* break existing code. Perhaps a new tag should be used to solicit core-like behavior\, as another monk suggested. Here's a simple script to reproduce the problem:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict; # use File::Glob ':glob';
my $dir = shift || "/etc"; my $max = shift || 1000; my $entries = 0; while (glob("$dir/*")) { last if (++$entries > $max); } print($entries\, " items under $dir\n");
Run it\, uncomment the use File::Glob ':glob'\, and rerun it (perhaps with a reduced count\, so it doesn't take too long... the loop is not only potentially infinite\, each iteration is sloooow).
Migrated from rt.perl.org#96116 (status was 'resolved')
Searchable as RT96116$