Re: [MacPerl] Odd behaviour with -d ?

[Alan Fry <ajf@afco.demon.co.uk>]

>> if($ARGV[0] =~ /(.*):/) { $dir = $1 }
>> opendir(HERE, "$dir");
>> @alltitles = readdir(HERE);
>> closedir(HERE);
>> foreach $title (@alltitles) {
>>     if (-d $title) {print "$title \(folder\)\n";next;}
>>     if (-B $title) {print "$title \(binary\)\n";next;}
>>     print "$title\n";
>> }


>From Andrew M Langmead:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>The issue is that opendir() does not pre-pend a full pathname to the
>list of files that it returns, and the filetest operators are assuming
>the current directory if no pathname is specified.
>if ( -d "$dir:$title") { print ....} >would probably do what you want.

No -- MacPerl regards that (and also 'if(-d $dir$title) as a syntax error.

>With your current code, you might also notice that ( -e $title) would
>return false.

Yes -- in fact you can print all the files in the directory correctly
complete with the nonsense message "this file does not exist".


>From Hal Wine:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>MacPerl (or Perl) doesn't loose the ability.  You asked it to check the
>type of files in the current directory, regardless of where the file
>reside!  Either change the current directory beforehand:
>    chdir( $dir ) || die( "Can't cd to '$dir': $!\n" );
>    opendir( HERE, ':' )....
>or use the given directory in the file tests:
>    if (-d "$dir$title")...

chdir() before opendir() does the trick. I take your point you should tell
Perl where to look, but it still seems odd to me it can 'see' the file
itself, but not the 'file _type_' if you don't.

To both Andrew and Hal -- many thanks for your replies and comments.

Alan