Another possibility: ($rootdir,$userdir) = split '//', $dir; Caveat: it looks like a string but is treated like a regex, meaning special characters like ., *, $, etc. are still special (have their normal regex meaning). But / is not special, so no problem there.

The slash / is special in your code, as it delimits the regex, cf. Tomte's post on how to choose different regex delimiter.

-- Hofmator