Hi SriniK,

First, there's the questions that Corion already raised. I just wanted to add: inside single-quoted strings, you don't need to escape $ symbols, just escape single quotes (') and other backslashes (\) with backslashes. Note how there's an extra backslash in $wf1 in the following example:

use warnings;
use strict;

my $wf1 = '\\\\XXXXXXX\\f\$\\apps\\webapps\\auth.wsl';
my $wf2 = '\\\\XXXXXXX\\f$\\apps\\webapps\\auth.wsl';
print $wf1, "\n";
print $wf2, "\n";

use Data::Dumper;
$Data::Dumper::Useqq=1;
print Dumper($wf1, $wf2);

__END__

\\XXXXXXX\f\$\apps\webapps\auth.wsl
\\XXXXXXX\f$\apps\webapps\auth.wsl
$VAR1 = "\\\\XXXXXXX\\f\\\$\\apps\\webapps\\auth.wsl";
$VAR2 = "\\\\XXXXXXX\\f\$\\apps\\webapps\\auth.wsl";
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Hope this helps,
-- Hauke D

Most likely this is either an issue because the current directory is not what you think it is, or a permissions issue because the external program runs as a Windows service which usually does not have the permissions to access network devices.

As you have not shown an SSCCE, it is quite hard to give you more concrete advice than to output all data as your program progresses to a log file and then compare the log files between a manual run and a run from the External program.

Thanks for replying. I have attached the sample code here.

If that is real, tested code, can you please explain what it is supposed to do:

@wslfiles[0]='\\\\XXXXXXX\\f\$\\apps\\webapps\\auth.wsl';
my @wsl = @{$_[0]};
foreach $filename(@wsl)
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If that was not real code that raises the error, then please post short, real code that raises the error (after removing the server name etc.).

From the error message, does the file mentioned in the error message exist?

dir \\XXXXXXX\f$\apps\webapps\auth.wsl
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use Data::Dumper;
...
print Dumper \@wsl;
foreach $filename(@wsl)
    {
    warn "trying to open file '$filename'\n";
    open(FIN, $filename)  or die "Could not open file '$filename' $!";
    warn "successfully opened file '$filename'\n";
    while (my $row = <FIN>)
...
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• The advantage of this approach is that you can put your filenames there totally unchanged, including backslashes, spaces and other special characters.
• Disadvantage: for characters outside the ASCII range you have to use the same encoding (binmode) as your editor (or whatever tool you use to put the filename into the config file).