Alternatively, use CORE module File::Spec, and let Perl handle it.

I second this.

use File::Spec::Functions;
my $path = catfile("xyzz", "qwen", "defs", "asd");
# $path is now "xyzz/qwen/defs/asd" on most systems,
# but on Windows it'll have backslashes instead
# and I think on old MacOS Classic systems it would
# have colons or something.  Don't ask about VMS.
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(Note: This is a reply equally to kennethk, jonadab, and anon)

sravs448 wants to append a trailing slash (whether or not that's an XY Problem is another topic). Unfortunately, File::Spec, despite being the core module to handle file/pathnames properly and portably, does not provide a method to do this. Most likely that's because "append a trailing slash" is not really a portable concept across all these supported OSes.

As long as the script is limited to a known set of OSes, McA's suggestion above is probably better in this case.

If there was a solution with a core module (perhaps I've missed something*), that'd make me happy, since I've faced this problem myself before. (Back when I had this problem I didn't find a decent CPAN module either.)

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dasgar's point about regexing File::Spec aside, it seems like any application that requires a trailing directory separator is really just not using File::Spec enough. Maybe it's my lack of imagination, but short of this literal spec (as you say, XY Problem) I cannot come up with an appropriate use case.

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#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.

You should be able to use a combination of File::Spec and a regex to dynamically determine what the seperation character is - provided that the regex contains all possible seperation characters.

use strict;
use warnings;

use File::Spec::Functions qw(:ALL);

use feature 'say';

my $testpath = catdir('foo','bar');
#say $testpath;
my $sepchar;
($sepchar) = ($testpath =~ m/(\\|\/)/);
say $sepchar;
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Not sure that this is any better than using $^O to determine the seperation character, but it one possible method using a core module. In either case, you still need to know the valid seperation characters for OSes that you intend to support. I guess the only advantage of the code above over using $^O is that you don't need to know the values of $^O for each OS.

Hi,

probably with something like that:

my %seperators = (
    'Linux' => '/',
    'MSWin32' => '\\',
    'MacOS' => '/',
);

my $op = quotemeta($seperators{$^O} || '/');
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Regards
McA

That's

my %separators = (
    linux => '/',
    MSWin32 => '\\',
    darwin => '/',
);
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There's other possible values, but the script could be restricted to run on only the "supported" platforms via

die "This script doesn't yet run on $^O\n"
    unless $separators{$^O};
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Running your code against your shown input does not produce the output you are showing. Please fix the input, code, and/or output.