Perl's automagical conversion of / to \ for Win 32 is great.

Mostly FYI, Perl doesn't convert / to \ for Win32. Win32 itself accepts / as a path separator almost everywhere. Even command.exe accepts / as a path separator. But most tools from Microsoft that access file names on their command line don't allow / as a path separator (because they use / to introduce command-line options).

Strangely, "open file" dialogues also don't accept / as a path separator, though I can find no reason why that should be (and this doesn't affect your Perl code unless you are stuffing fake keystrokes into a GUI with Perl, which is how I noticed this).

Also, the Registry doesn't allow / as a key path separator because you can use / as part of a key name. Luckilly, Win32::TieRegistry deals with this rather well so Perl coders don't have to fret about it.

So it is often best to use / as your directory path separator in Perl and convert / to \ if you need to hand the path to an external program on its command line.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")

In reply to / vs. \ in Win32 (Re: Glob on Win32: porting 5.005 to 5.6) by tye
in thread Glob on Win32: porting 5.005 to 5.6 by perchance

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