#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

my $fn = q{C:\Music\Ray LaMontagne\2010 - God Willin' & The Creek Don'
+t Rise};
print -d $fn;
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You're right. My dumb text editor added the .txt ext and dumb me didn't notice it.

c:\test>Perl-1.pl
C:\Music\Ray LaMontagne\2010 - God Willin' & The Creek Don't Rise.txt
$VAR1 = [
          2,
          0,
          33206,
          1,
          0,
          0,
          2,
          0,
          1438291895,
          1438291895,
          1438291895,
          '',
          ''
        ];
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I suspect that you're assigning $fn like this:
my $fn = "E:\Music\Ray LaMontagne\2010 - God Willin' & The Creek Don't Rise";

If that's the case and you have warnings enabled, you should be receiving a warning like this.

Unrecognized escape \M passed through at C:\test\Perl-1.pl line 9.
Unrecognized escape \R passed through at C:\test\Perl-1.pl line 9.
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Not to mention octal character  \201 which is interpolated quite silently:

c:\@Work\Perl\monks>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $fn = qq{E:\Music\Ray LaMontagne\2010 - God Willin' & The Creek Do
+n't Rise};
 print qq{'$fn'};
"
Unrecognized escape \M passed through at -e line 1.
Unrecognized escape \R passed through at -e line 1.
'E:MusicRay LaMontagneü0 - God Willin' & The Creek Don't Rise'
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---

Give a man a fish:  <%-(-(-(-<

A simple workaround is to use forward slashes instead of backslashes. Windows accepts them without problems. The only place where forward slashes may become problematic is on the command line of external programs. In that case, a simple tr|/|\\| helps.

Alexander

--
Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-)

Exactly how are you assigning $fn.

Please post a short but complete test script that demonstrates the problem.

I was just going to ask that after I quickly tested the following successfully on Windows.

use strict;
use warnings;

my $fn = "this 'is' a text file.txt";

my @a = stat $fn;

print "$_\n" for @a;
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Yes, that works, but when you start adding the full path which also includes spaces, it fails.

The issue is with getting the quoting and escaping set correctly for the shell.

c:\test>dir "C:\Music\Ray LaMontagne"
 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is 4CD3-F30A

 Directory of C:\Music\Ray LaMontagne

07/30/2015  02:31 PM    <DIR>          .
07/30/2015  02:31 PM    <DIR>          ..
07/30/2015  02:31 PM                 0 2010 - God Willin' & The Creek 
+Don't Rise.txt
               1 File(s)              0 bytes
               2 Dir(s)  938,700,210,176 bytes free

c:\test>type Perl-1.pl
#!/usr/bin/perl

use 5.010;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

# I created this full path for the test
my $fn = q(C:\Music\Ray LaMontagne\2010 - God Willin' & The Creek Don'
+t Rise);
print $fn, $/;

#my $fn = "this 'is' a text file.txt";

my @s = stat $fn;
print Dumper \@s;

c:\test>Perl-1.pl
C:\Music\Ray LaMontagne\2010 - God Willin' & The Creek Don't Rise
$VAR1 = [];
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I've delt with this issue before and always need to run a bunch of tests to get the quoting/escaping correct.

The line is in fact read from a text file. Here is some simplified code that reads from a file containing only the one line I am talking about here.

use 5.12.0;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Carp;

open IN,"<DirList.txt";
my $fn=<IN>;
chomp $fn;

say $fn;

my @st=stat $fn;

if (@st) {
    say "Array defined";
} else {
    say "Array undefined";
}
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The result is:

E:\Music\Ray LaMontagne\2010 - God Willin' & The Creek Don't Rise
Array undefined
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Note that the "chomp" and the "say" don't seem to have a problem with the variable $fn containing a string that has single quotes and backslashes in it. So I was expecting "stat" to not have a problem. Obviously I was wrong.

Further testing indicates that we are getting side tracked by the single quote issue. That is if we change the input file so it specifies a file or directory name that contains extended ascii as in an accented e (0x82) then we get the same result with the stat function. Windows accepts these name. stat does not. The name I tested with came from my Adobe Acrobat installation in C:\Program Files (x86).

Here is the modified program run against an updated input file.

use 5.12.0;
use strict;
use warnings;
use Carp;

open IN,"<DirList2.txt";
my $fn=<IN>;
chomp $fn;

my @st=stat $fn;

if (@st) {
    say "Array defined";
} else {
    say "Array undefined";
}
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The input was:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Acrobat 10.0\Acrobat\Sequences\FRA\Cr0xc20x82er des fichiers PDF accessibles.sequ

The output was:

Array undefined

"\"$var\""
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EDIT2: Please disregard, I was thinking about feeding another program a quoted string and the above was my solution. I am sure it will not work for your situation.

FYI, Win32::ShellQuote, system_detached