Me too, I strongly suggest forward slashes like in "./path/to/your/file.ext" you gain a little in portability too. If you need more portability you have to use the core module File::Spec and concatenate file and paths using his methods.

As you are new on such platform I strongly advocate the use of Strawberry Perl that come with many goodies that help you to work as you do in other platform like installing directly from CPAN.

L*