Question

I need to get an example file file from a find command in a Perl script to create another system call afterwards. For some reason, the find command gets stuck when I call it from the script. Here is what I need to do:

my $search_dir = "/something/like/this/??/??/??";
# the triple '??' are needed here
my $cmd = "find $search_dir -name \"\*.$var1.token1.$var2.ext\" | head -n 1";
my $first_example_file = `$cmd`; chomp $first_example_file;

This gets stuck when I run it through Perl, it never finishes executing the command, whereas the constructed $cmd runs in no time if I copy+paste it and run in in my bash terminal. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Try using the File::Find perl module for finding files. If you would like to use bash's find in your perl then you might have to use $(..) in your command.

I am not in to perl … just trying to help out.

Update:

As stated in the comments by Rohaq you can also use File::Find::Rule