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Re^2: greater efficiency required (ls, glob, or readdir?)

by betterworld (Curate)
on Aug 27, 2008 at 18:24 UTC ( [id://707248]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to Re: greater efficiency required (ls, glob, or readdir?)
in thread greater efficiency required (ls, glob, or readdir?)

My personal opinion is that running a child process to get a directory listing is a rather silly thing to do. I wouldn't use ls. Doubly so for using cat for reading a file!!!

I second that; especially because $dir and $_ will be interpreted by the shell. So you will get problems if a directory name or entry has special characters in it.

Even if you don't think that this is important in your case, it's better to make the code more maintainable and re-usable for security-aware scenarios.

While you can avoid these problems by using open my $pipe, '-|', 'ls', $dir, it's really not worth the trouble; readdir (or IO::Dir) has less problems. And for reading the file, use open or File::Slurp.

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Re^3: greater efficiency required (ls, glob, or readdir?)
by JavaFan (Canon) on Aug 27, 2008 at 19:37 UTC
    Actually, $dir and $_ will only be interpreted by the shell if they contain "funny" characters. If a string passed as argument to qx or one-arg system contains just alphanums, underscores and whitespace, no shell gets involved, perl will call execv directly.

    But obviously, if you don't know what $dir contains, you shouldn't use `ls $dir`, and if you aren't in control of the content of the directory you should use `cat $_`.

    Even if you don't think that this is important in your case, it's better to make the code more maintainable and re-usable for security-aware scenarios.

    I cannot agree with that, if only for the reasons it's often not mutually possible. More maintable code usually means simpler code, while code that needs to be run in a possible hostile environment tends to be more complex than code that doesn't have to run in such an environment. "More maintable" and "re-usable for security aware scenarios" are most of the time conflicting requirements.

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