Webmaster Forum / Perl / Modules / July 2004

I'm using Perl 5.6.1 on Debian Linux 3.0

I noticed the module File::Basename doesn't behave like the shell
commands basename/dirname in a special case that's not described in the
module's documentation.

When a full directory path is given to the shell commands, the result is
consistent, no matter if the path ends with a trailing / or not:

$ dirname /usr/local/; basename /usr/local/
/usr
local
$ dirname /usr/local; basename /usr/local
/usr
local

When a full directory path is given to File::Basename, the result only
makes sense when the path does not contain a trailing / character:

$ perl -MFile::Basename -we '$p="/usr/local/"; print dirname($p),"\n",basename($p),"\n";'
/usr

$ perl -MFile::Basename -we '$p="/usr/local"; print dirname($p),"\n",basename($p),"\n";'
/usr
local

If the given path ends in /, then the final path element dissapears!
Unless I'm writing code for the great Houdini, I think this is a bug,
what do you think? :-)