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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
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Did I say I expect Perl to do the right thing? :-)
--Larry Wall in <199911200217.SAA24898@kiev.wall.org>
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almost perfect (Score:1)
The one problem with this is that the root directory needs a trailing slash to be correct. The above approach results in $dir = '/', $file = 'foo', "$dir/$file" = '//foo' - it gets a double slash for an important special case. If you always leave the trailing slash, you can use "$dir$file" instead and $dir is correct. Using '/foo/bar/' as a directory name is perhaps a bit ugly but correct. (A doubled slash is also ugly but correct, so you choose whichever ugliness grates less.)
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Re:almost perfect (Score:2)
Double slash makes it ugly to the OS; not having a slash between filename components makes it ugly to the programmer. I choose making it nice for myself.
Plus, how often do you need to represent the root directory in a variable? Do you write many temporary files there or anything? Or permanent files? :)
J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers