From: Michael W Ryder <data@...>
Date: 2010-03-13T11:20:05+09:00
Subject: Re: Dir.glob problem

Joel VanderWerf wrote:
> Michael W Ryder wrote:
>> Michael W Ryder wrote:
>>> David Vlad wrote:
>>>> In the program Im making I need to read some wma files into a variable
>>>> and I did like this:
>>>>
>>>> songs = Dir.glob("C:\\Users\\Public\\Music\\Sample Music\\*.wma")
>>>>
>>>> Note that this is NOT the wrong directory, I've copy pasted it from the
>>>> map itself and also the files are wma and nothing else. My programming
>>>> teacher has no idea why this dosnt work and the other ppl I've talked
>>>> with dosnt know either. Most said something like "aside from a simple
>>>> mistake like wrong directory/extension, I don't know what could be going
>>>> wrong." So now this forum is my last resort, why on earth dosnt this
>>>> work?!
>>> The only way I could get it to work is to use the example at 
>>> http://ruby-doc.org/core/classes/Dir.html and create a directory 
>>> variable such as: lfiles=Files.join("C:", "Users", "Public", "Music", 
>>> "Sample Music", "*.wma") and then use a=Dir.glob(lfiles).
>>> The only problem with that approach is that the entire path is added 
>>> to each file.  I don't know if this is a concern or not.
>> Further experimenting found two other solutions.  The first is to use:
>> a=Dir.glob("C:/Users/Public/Music/Sample Music/*.wma") which has the 
>> same "problem" as my first solution.
>> A better solution may be to use Dir.chdir to change to the directory and 
>> then use Dir.glob to extract the file names.  This has the advantage of 
>> not including the path in front of each file name.
> 
> chdir is not thread safe, it changes the pwd which is global to the 
> process. Here's an alternative:
> 
> d = Dir.new("/tmp") # use fwd slashes even on windows
> d.grep(/\.wma$/)
> 
> This should give you an array of filenames in the dir.
> 

Is there a way to expand this to include subdirectories like .glob 
allows?  .grep doesn't appear to work on the string created by File.join.