'ls' question, splitting and files with spaces in their name...

[James Knott]

Madison Kelly wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>   I need to read in the results of an 'ls' call to a bunch of variables 
> (in Perl) and I am doing so like this:
> 
>  =- Snip
>     open (LS, "ls -lA '$mnt_dir' 2>&1 |");
>     while (<LS>)
>     {
>         s/\n//;
>         # The first $perm will be "total"
>         ($perm, $num, $owner, $group, $size, $month, $day, $time_year, 
> $file)=split/\s+/;
>  =- Snip
> 
>   My problem is that I am just straight splitting on spaces and some 
> files and directory names have spaces in them. I read the 'ls' man page 
> and the closest thing I could find was a switch to add an escape 
> character before the space but that would only be marginally helpful.
> 
>   What I need is some way to show the file or directory name with some 
> other character instead of a space so that the first split will leave 
> the file or directory name intact wherein after I could substitute the 
> space back.
> 
>   Anyone have any ideas that might help?
> 
>   The only thing I can think of is to add a whole bunch of $file1, 
> $file2, $file3, ... $file# and then splice them back together but that 
> would be cumbersome and also create a limit on the number of spaces that 
> could be in a file name (and risk missing those above that).


Perhaps I'm missing something, but it doesn't seem like there's much of 
a problem, if you approach it in the right way.  If you do a "ls -lA", 
you'll notice that the file or directory is always the last item, on a 
line with a fixed number of items.  Why not just pull off the first 
eight items, using the space separator and take the rest of the line as 
the file or directory name?


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