I'm trying to get an array of files from a directory tree in a Perl script. Sometimes I can grab them with glob expansion, but something I only way to capture what I need is with a regex.
For example, I might want to get all of the files which would match verify/*.finished with shell expansion. Using glob(<pattern>) is faster than matching everything found with File::Find when I know the depth at which the "verify" directory lives (e.g. glob("*/*/*/verify/*.finished"), but am a little stuck when I need to rely on regex matching.
Is there any way to get the efficiency of glob with the flexibility of regex?
Well, you could just generate the full list of files with glob, then grep the results using regular expressions:
my @files = grep { /\.finished\z/ } glob '*/*/*/verify/*';
EDIT:
If the question is if there's a facility that works like glob but uses regular expressions, I believe the answer is no. In the completely general case, I don't see that you have any alternative but to traverse an entire directory tree, and I doubt you'll be able to do substantially better than File::Find.