Question

I would like to perform an ls command on a file named like /var/local/tmp/foo*. I have been trying to use

%x[ls "#{path]"]

but this returns:

ls: /var/local/tmp/foo*: No such file or directory

Note that %x[ls ‘/var/local/tmp/foo*’] also returns above error.

If I do the same command, but as follows:

%x[ls /var/local/tmp/foo*]

it works correctly.

I am guessing that putting the directory path into a string is causing ls to treat it as a file literally named “/var/local/tmp/foo*”.

Any ideas how to get around this? I would like to use a variable that holds this string, so just putting in /var/local/tmp/foo* directly is not an option.

Answer 1

Something like "/path/to/*" is called a glob, and they are actually expanded by the shell, not by commands like ls. While you could run the shell to have it expand the glob for you, it is easier to just use the built-in Dir class.

Dir["/path/to/*.txt"]

This returns an array of matching file names.