You can use both / and \ as a path separator in Perl programs on Win32. The only important thing to remember is that in string literals \ char has special meaning (it is an escape char) and it must be doubled to get single \ char. I.e

# ok
my $path = "dir/file.txt";

# not ok 
my $path = "dir\file.txt";

# ok
my $path = "dir\\file.txt";

# also ok - in single quoted strings only sequences \' and \\ are spec
+ial
my $path = 'dir\file.txt';
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Of course it is Win32 specific and it is just easier to always use / as a path separator what is more portable. Or even use File::Spec what is the most portable way to create filepaths from components:

use File::Spec;

my $path = File::Spec->catfile(qw(dir file.txt));
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Update: Fixed mismatched quotes. Thanks to Ionizor who noticed it.

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Ilya Martynov, ilya@iponweb.net
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