Question

I’m using the Net::FTP::File module to get a list of directories in a remote path. It seemed to work fine until I stepped on this case where a directory named en shows up as just n, details:

'n' => {
    'Bytes' => '4096',
    'Group' => 'client3',
    'Owner' => '5004',
    'Path' => 'n',
    'Last Modified Year/Time' => '17:59',
    'Permissions' => 'drwxrwxr-x',
    'Last Modified Day' => '17',
    'Link To' => undef,
    'Number of Links' => '7',
    'Last Modified Month' => 'Jan'
},

the directory on the server has the correct name (en) same owner/group/permissions as other directories that display fine.

I reduced the test case to the minimum so I know the problem doesn’t depend on other bugs:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use Net::FTP::File;

use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Terse  = 1;
$Data::Dumper::Indent = 1;

my $ftp = new Net::FTP($site);
$ftp->login($user, $pass);
print Dumper $ftp->dir_hashref;

is there anything I’m doing wrong that might cause this error? Or is it a bug in the dir_hashref() function of the module?

Alternatively, what’s another (convenient) way to get only the directories in an FTP list? Standard Net::FTP provides the dir() method, but it’s just a list of ls -l like strings that have to be parsed.

Answer 1

I’d be inclined to suspect the filename contains an unusual character.

Do you see the file with the correct name if you use a normal FTP client to connect to that server?

Try passing the Debug parameter to the Net::FTP constructor, for instance:

my $ftp = Net::FTP->new($hostname, Debug => 1);

That should get you some more debug info, in particular the dialog between your script and the server, which will likely be of use.