perlisfun has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, Is there any way to write perl script to run on Win32 and UNIX both without worrying path format '/path/thisway' on UNIX and '\path\thisway' on Win32 Thanks,

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Re: Compatibility on Win32 and UNIX
by rinceWind (Monsignor) on May 10, 2002 at 15:59 UTC
    Check out modules File::Spec in the core distribution. These cope with many more file path syntaxes than Unix and Win32. For example: VMS
    Device:[dir.subdir.subsubdir]file.ext;ver

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    If you want your code to be truly portable (which is a good aim), you should be using modules such as File::Spec to handle the fine details of paths.

    One thing to be careful of though is case sensitivity. Unix is case sensitive, whereas Win32 only pretends to be.

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Re: Compatibility on Win32 and UNIX
by atopolc (Pilgrim) on May 10, 2002 at 16:04 UTC
    You could check the  $^O variable and switch the path format depending on the result. 

    $^O eq "hpux" ? $path='/path/thisway':$path='\path\thisway';

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      Don't do it. It is ugly. Just use File::Spec. Let perl hackers who maintain this module worry which slash to use on which platform. 
      use File::Spec;
$path = File::Spec->catfile('path', 'thisway');

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      --
      Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)

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        Thanks and appreciations go to all of you. Have a good weekend.
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