Backticks in directory query generate problems with pipe

Question

I'm trying to fill a Perl array with a list of file names in a directory,$dir, and I want to exclude directories. My code is:

my @lsArray = `ls -p $dir | grep -v '/$'`;

But it creates this error:

sh: -c: line 0: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `''
sh: -c: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of file

I cant seem to find a combination of quotes which does this correctly. Thanks....

Answer 1

Why are you using backticks for something that perl can do perfectly fine on its own?

my @files = grep !-d, <$dir/*>;

Btw, your error is that $' is a perl predefined variable (postmatch) that gets interpolated, so the closing ' is missing.

If you had used

use strict;
use warnings;

Perl would have told you what the problem was:

Use of uninitialized value $' in quoted execution (``, qx) at ...

Always use those two pragmas: Errors do not get less difficult to handle because you don't know about them.