Glad you got it sorted. Perl's automagical conversion of / to \ for Win 32 is great. If you want to get Win32 type names for display to users you just do something like this:

my $perl = '/foo/bar/baz';
(my $win = $perl) =~ tr!/!\\!;
print "Perl still sees:  $perl\n";
print "But we can print: $win\n";
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cheers

tachyon

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Perl's automagical conversion of / to \ for Win 32 is great.

Mostly FYI, Perl doesn't convert / to \ for Win32. Win32 itself accepts / as a path separator almost everywhere. Even command.exe accepts / as a path separator. But most tools from Microsoft that access file names on their command line don't allow / as a path separator (because they use / to introduce command-line options).

Strangely, "open file" dialogues also don't accept / as a path separator, though I can find no reason why that should be (and this doesn't affect your Perl code unless you are stuffing fake keystrokes into a GUI with Perl, which is how I noticed this).

Also, the Registry doesn't allow / as a key path separator because you can use / as part of a key name. Luckilly, Win32::TieRegistry deals with this rather well so Perl coders don't have to fret about it.

So it is often best to use / as your directory path separator in Perl and convert / to \ if you need to hand the path to an external program on its command line.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

Even command.exe accepts / as a path separator.

If command.com accepts / then why does it fail in the last case?

C:\>type test.bat
REM Hello tye!
C:\>type .\test.bat
REM Hello tye!
C:\>type ./test.bat
Invalid switch - /TEST.BAT

C:\>test.bat

C:\>REM Hello tye!

C:\>.\test.bat

C:\>REM Hello tye!

C:\>./test.bat
Bad command or file name

C:\>
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cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print