Invalid argument in opendir()

[gorgor]

I've noticed that Perl's opendir() command does NOT like the '-' (dash) symbol. Is there a way around this? I'm writing a console Perl script that takes an @ARGV for the name of a directory and I need to be able to include special characters in the directory name such as a dash.

 

[justice41]

Can you provide an example? and a code snibbit. I've never come across this problem, nor can i reproduce it.

jaa

 

[gorgor]

I reproduced the error by using this snippet:

my $dir = 'q:/2002-03-26';

#Open the directory to read its contents
opendir(DIR,$dir) || die $!; #this is line 82

the error:
"Invalid argument at script.pl line 82."


I've tried escaping the dashes, using double quotes around $dir, single quotes around $dir, double quotes around the $dir assignment, just about everything I can think of. Maybe I'm just crazy?

 

[Parcival21]

I've tried to reproduce your problem by using following code:
$dir="C:\\temp\\2002-08-09";
opendir(DIR, $dir)||die $!;
@dateien=readdir DIR;
closedir DIR;
print "$dir\n";
print "@dateien";
Starting the skript I did not get any errors.
I had following output:
C:\Perlskript>perltest1.pl #Skriptaufruf
C:\temp\2002-08-09
. .. logfile.log ordner1 ordner2 ordner3
maybe I didn'd quite understand what you were asking for.

 

[gorgor]

that's it. It's not letting me open a directory that has a dash in its name. I tried to replace the name of the directory to a directory that doesn't have dashes in its name and it opened it fine. hmmmm

 

[justice41]

I couldn't reproduce this on XP or linux. Have you tried escaping the dashes in a double quoted string?

my $dir = "2002\-03\-26";

This still works for me. It doesn't work if they are escaped using s/// so that wouldn't help if you are reading the dirs in from STDIN or a file.

jaa

 

[gorgor]

That was REALLY dumb! I had permissions set to administrators only. Works fine now! That directory was the only directory out of about 8 that had the wrong permissions set, so I didn't even think to check it. Well, thanks for the help!!