FnMatch

Section: User Contributed Perl Documentation (3)
Updated: 2005-03-30
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NAME

File::FnMatch - simple filename and pathname matching

SYNOPSIS

  use File::FnMatch qw(:fnmatch);    # import everything

  # shell-style: match "/a/bc", but not "/a/.bc" nor "/a/b/c"
  fnmatch("/a/*", $fn, FNM_PATHNAME|FNM_PERIOD);

  # find our A- executables only
  grep { fnmatch("A-*.exe", $_) } readdir SOMEDIR;

DESCRIPTION

File::FnMatch::fnmatch() provides simple, shell-like pattern matching.

Though considerably less powerful than regular expressions, shell patterns are nonetheless useful and familiar to a large audience of end-users.

Functions

fnmatch ( PATTERN, STRING [, FLAGS] ): Returns true if PATTERN matches STRING, undef otherwise. FLAGS may be the bitwise OR'ing of any supported FNM_* constants (see below).

Constants

FNM_NOESCAPE: Do not treat a backslash ('\') in PATTERN specially. Otherwise, a backslash escapes the following character.
FNM_PATHNAME: Prohibit wildcards from matching a slash ('/').
FNM_PERIOD: Prohibit wildcards from matching a period ('.') at the start of a string and, if FNM_PATHNAME is also given, immediately after a slash.

Other possibilities include at least FNM_CASEFOLD (compare "qr//i"), FNM_LEADING_DIR to restrict matching to everything before the first '/', FNM_FILE_NAME as a synonym for FNM_PATHNAME, and the rather more exotic FNM_EXTMATCH. Consult your system documentation for details.

EXPORT

None by default. The export tag ":fnmatch" exports the fnmatch function and all available FNM_* constants.

PATTERN SYNTAX

Wildcards are the question mark ('?') to match any single character and the asterisk ('*') to match zero or more characters. FNM_PATHNAME and FNM_PERIOD restrict the scope of the wildcards, notably supporting the UNIX convention of concealing ``dotfiles'':

Bracket expressions, enclosed by '[' and ']', match any of a set of characters specified explicitly ("[abcdef]"), as a range ("[a-f0-9]"), or as the combination these ("[a-f0-9XYZ]"). Additionally, many implementations support named character classes such as "[[:xdigit:]]". Character sets may be negated with an initial '!' ("[![:space:]]").

Locale influences the meaning of fnmatch() patterns.

CAVEATS

Most UNIX-like systems provide an fnmatch implementation. This module will not work on platforms lacking an implementation, most notably Win32.

AUTHOR

Michael J. Pomraning

Please report bugs to <mjp-perl AT pilcrow.madison.wi.us>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.