perltutorial
tachyon
<p>Different Operating Systems use different characters as their path separator when specifying directory and file paths:
<pre>
foo/bar/baz # *nix uses a /
foo\bar\baz # Win32 uses a \
foo:bar:baz # Mac OS 9 uses a :
foo/bar/baz # Mac OS X uses a / (usually!)
</pre>
<p>In Perl you can generally just use a / as your path separator (except on Mac OS 9, thanks [Hanamaki]). Why? Because Perl will <b>automagically</b> convert the / to the correct path separator for the system it is running on! This means that coding Windows paths like this
<pre>$path = "\\foo\\bar\\baz";</pre>
<p>is not required. You can just use this:
<pre>$path = "/foo/bar/baz";</pre>
<p>and things will be fine. In fact using \\ can be problematic, but you probably already know that :-)
<p>If you want to display the expected system delimiter to a user (ie hide the fact that you are using / internally) you can just do something like this:
<code>my $perl_path = '/foo/bar/baz';
(my $win_path = $perl_path) =~ tr!/!\\!;
print "Perl still sees: $perl_path\n";
print "But we can print: $win_path\n";
</code>
<p>If you need to do lots of conversions just write a sub like this:
<code>my $perl_path = '/foo/bar/baz';
print "This is the Windows path: ", win_path($perl_path), "\n";
sub win_path {
(my $path = shift) =~ tr!/!\\!;
return $path;
}
</code>
So there you have it. Paths in Perl. By using a / you make it much easier to port your code to another system. For truly portable methods look into the [File::Spec] module (part of the standard distro) and [perlman:perlport]. Thanks to [wog] and [Hanamaki] for this suggestion. And if you have been converting / to \\ ....