G'day ovedpo15,

I'd use a bracketed character class. A negated one is possibly the easiest. If you want to individually specify special characters, see "Special Characters Inside a Bracketed Character Class". Here's an example.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use Test::More;

my @tests = (
    ['a!b@c#', 'a\!b\@c\#'],
    ['{d}e(f)', '\{d\}e\(f\)'],
    [q{g"h'i}, q{g\"h\'i}],
    ['[/].\\', '\[/\].\\\\'],
);

plan tests => 0+@tests;

my $re = qr{([^0-9A-Za-z./])};

for my $test (@tests) {
    my ($got, $exp) = @$test;
    $got =~ s/$re/\Q$1/g;
    ok $got eq $exp;
}
[download]

Output:

1..4
ok 1
ok 2
ok 3
ok 4
[download]

Extend those tests with real pathnames from your application.

You may need different regexes for rsync and cp (depends on whether "except" should be "accept" or "expect" :-)