use Path::Tiny qw/ path /;
my $f = path( q(/home/temp/login));
while( not $f->is_rootdir ){
    print join ' ', $f, $f->basename, "\n", ;
    $f=$f->parent;
}
__END__
/home/temp/login login
/home/temp temp
/home home
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use File::Basename;

my $d = "/home/temp/login"; 
my @b = (); 
while ($d ne dirname($d)) {    # as long as we can move up directory t
+ree, when we are at root the dirname won't change any more
    push @b, basename($d); 
    $d = dirname($d)
} 
print join "\n", reverse(@b)
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A quick and dirty solution might be really to use something like my @path = split m:/:, "/home/temp/login"; Disadvantage of such a solution is that your code will break if a dirname contains a slash or you start working on Windows.

Actually, / is not allowed in directory or file names. Windows disallows both \ and /

FYI, Windows accepts both \ and / as separators:

perl -e "print $ARGV[0] . ':';open(FH,$ARGV[0]) or die $ARGV[0] . ':' . $!;" dir/file.txt

You're probably right, but I prefer defensive programming. In production code, I hate such assumptations, as there is always a chance that they will break in strange spots. Here, maybe a network drive on windows with double back slash like \\server or so might be nasty, or maybe the path might be in future something like ftp://home/temp/login. Maybe some internal stuff allows creating hidden anything with [/\\] inside, like perl allows us to create a sub "Hi with spaces inside" if we just manipulate the symbol table. I don't know for sure and won't know if something goes wrong why.

So I try to advocate using modules that do exactly this job like File::Basename or Path::Tiny. At least, if those are much used modules, there is a lesser chance that things might go wrong.

Of course, if I just write a snippet, I'd split m:[/\\]:, ... in a heart beat, also. No need to check a module doc if all you want is a short script that won't be used by other (persons/modules/programs).

Greetings,
Janek Schleicher

Yet another way to do it with the core module File::Spec:

my $path = "/home/temp/login";

use File::Spec;
my @paths = File::Spec->splitdir($path);

print "\"$_\"\n" for @paths;
__END__
""
"home"
"temp"
"login"
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The initial empty string at $paths[0] is due to the initial slash in the path (root directory).

my @paths = grep { -d} glob ("/home/temp/login/*");
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That lists the directories in the directory /home/temp/login/ (excluding ones starting with dots), but doesn't split the pathname into its components.

Yes, you are alsolutely right. I wonder how I could misread so thoroughly the question or forget its content before I wrote my post. I should probably have had another coffee this morning before coming to the monastery.

my $path = '/home/temp//login' ;
my ( @parts ) = ( $path =~ /([\/\\]?\w+)(?(?=[\/\\]+\w+[\/\\]*?$)[\/\\
+]+)(?=$|[\/\\])?/g );

warn Dumper \@parts ;
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my ( $a, $b , $c ) = ...
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