The shell's most likely your problem here, not Perl. Perl won't look at the contents of $filename if you interpolate it into a string, but the resulting string will be seen by a shell which will happily interpret $var if you're not careful.

The following works for me: 

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $filename = q{$vaa it's not.txt};
$file =~ s/\$/\\\$/;

my $exec = `touch "$filename"`;

[download]

The double quotes (in the `` string) are passed to the shell there, and ensure that the spaces in $filename won't be an issue. The regular expression adds a backslash in front of the dollar sign; this keeps it from being interpreted by the shell. Finally, the single quote in the filename is not considered special by either Perl or the shell.

In reply to Re: quoting/escaping file names by AppleFritter
in thread quoting/escaping file names by famatte

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.