NAME

Win32::Autoglob -- expand globs in @ARGV when the shell doesn't

SYNOPSIS

In a Perl program:

use Win32::Autoglob;
foreach my $thing (@ARGV) {
  print "And also $thing\n";
}

Or from the command line:

perl -MWin32::Autoglob

DESCRIPTION

Normal MSWindows shells are exceptional in that they don't do globbing for you -- i.e., if you enter:

C:\stuff> perl thing.pl whatever.bin *.txt thing.dat

then thing.pl's @ARGV will consist of just ('whatever.bin', '*.txt', 'thing.dat').

If you just add use Win32::Autoglob; in your program, this module will alter @ARGV by performing globbing. I.e., '*.txt' will be expanded to whatever *.txt matches, like ('whatever.bin', 'junk.txt', 'stuff.txt', 'thing.dat') -- or if there are no *.txt files, you'll just get an @ARGV of ('whatever.bin', 'thing.dat').

Under Cygwin or under anything but MSWin, this module has no effect, so you can use use Win32::Autoglob; in any program, and the globbing will happen only when it's running under MSWin (and not Cygwin, because Cygwin does do globbing).

FUNCTIONS

None.

VARIABLES

None. (But it can affect @ARGV.)

THANKS

Thanks to Citizen X and Dave Adler for help.

HINT

If you have a program called funkify.pl written for under Unix, consider putting it in a directory in your path, and just creating a funkify.bat along with it, consisting of just this:

@echo off
perl -MWin32::Autoglob -S funkify.pl %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

COPYRIGHT AND DISCLAIMERS

Copyright (c) 2002 Sean M. Burke. All rights reserved.

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

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

But let me know if it gives you any problems, OK?

AUTHOR

Sean M. Burke sburke@cpan.org