What are the comparative advantages of glob('f

Question

I was just looking at Can someone tell me how to create an array of directory contents?. Unsurprisingly, file globs were offered as an answer. What surprised me was that the post recommended using glob() rather than <*>.

I use <*> because that is what I learned a long time ago and have never thought about it. Which is not a good reason.

What syntax do you prefer for globbing, and why?

Answer 1

Personally, I think that <> is badly overloaded. It sort of means "read from an iterator" but there's a little too much magic and subtlety in determining which iterator of what kind for my taste. e.g. <$foo> and <$foo{bar}> mean very different things, and the magical bare <> means something different yet.

I prefer to use glob and reserve the <> syntax for handles. Doing that saves the cognitive burden of figuring out whether the contents of the <> is a pattern rather than a handle (or something that resolves to one). That said, if you mentally associate the <> notation with "iterator" instead of "read" you might prefer that to the functional syntax -- at least for those cases where you want to step over the results rather than generate a list.

Answer 2

That perldoc you linked says there's some issues with the angle-bracket syntax:

One level of double-quote interpretation is done first, but you can't say <$foo> because that's an indirect filehandle as explained in the previous paragraph. (In older versions of Perl, programmers would insert curly brackets to force interpretation as a filename glob: <${foo}> . These days, it's considered cleaner to call the internal function directly as glob($foo), which is probably the right way to have done it in the first place.)

I mostly use File::Find and its ilk myself.

Answer 3

These days I stick with glob, because I find it to be more readable and newbie-friendly(*) as compared to using angle brackets.

(*) perldoc -f glob works.