Question

I’m wanting to issue the find command in Perl and loop through the resulting file paths. I’m trying it like so (but not having any luck):

my $cmd;

open($cmd, '-|', 'find $input_dir -name "*.fastq.gz" -print') or die $!;

while ($line = <$cmd>) {
   print $line;
}

close $cmd;

Any ideas?

Thanks

Answer 1

You’re not applying enough escaping to the * character.
Prepending a \ should fix it.

It’s better not to invoke the shell in the first place,
by separating the arguments:

use warnings;
use strict;

open(my $cmd, '-|', 'find', $input_dir, '-name', '*.fastq.gz', '-print') or die $!;

while (my $line = <$cmd>) {
   print $line;
}

close $cmd;