Perl5 and File::Basename as inlike trick!
Today I asked for help in fixing a Perl 5 program of mine. The program was working really fine, so nothing really problematic was here, it was just that feeling that things could be done better, shorter, in a more Perl-way! And the suggestion came out from the Perl Beginners Mailing list, yeas sometimes you need to get to the root… So, here’s the diff of the code I committed today:
- if ( $current_object->{ type } eq 'dir' ){
- my @remote_dirs = File::Spec->splitdir( $remote_path );
- pop @remote_dirs;
- $remote_path = File::Spec->catdir( @remote_dirs );
- }
+ $remote_path = dirname( $remote_path ) if ( $current_object->{ type } eq 'dir' );
/a/b/c/d/f so that only the absolute beginning part up to /a/b/c/d/ remains. Since I’m used to File::Specs, and I cannot find there anything helping with my tiny problem, I split up the path into parts, throwing away the last element and reassembling the parts to a full path. As you can see, all the above is conditioned by an if statement, and that prompted my brain for a better way to do it with a postfix condition, that seems to me a better way to read this operation.
Anyway, in order to adopt a postfix conditional I need to tear down the block of code to a single command or a single pipeline, but I was not finding out anything useful in File::Spec.
And then File::Basename came as a rescue with its dirname method that blindly returns the path up to the last to end part, exactly what I needed for.
And yes, I could have done it via regular expressions, but I was looking for a more portable way to do it.
Again, a great lesson learned from being humble and adopting the great CPAN.