Although this is an old thread I think it aligns well with a current issue I have whilst processing Windows paths. I have spent the last hour scouring THE WEB and can't for the life of me find a clean solution to my issue. Basically what I want to do is split a path into a list of each sub directory, so in its simplest form I tried the following... 
$PathOnly = "c:\Dir1\Dir2\Dir3";

@SubDirs = split('\', $PathOnly);

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This doesn't work since the \' gets escaped and I end up effectively with a missing ' So, tried to escape the \ with the following... 
@SubDirs = split('\\', $PathOnly);

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But that also has an error "trailing \ in regex" As does the following... 
@SubDirs = split("\\", $PathOnly);

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I even tried the following... 
my $SplitAt = "\\";
my @SubDirs = split($SplitAt, $PathOnly);

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Whilst this doesn't have syntax errors, and $SplitAt seems to get theexpected "\" it fails on the execution of the split with the same "trailing \ in regex", just at execution time this time. Now... just for kicks and giggles I tried the following... 
my $SplitAt = "\\\\";
my @SubDirs = split($SplitAt, $PathOnly);

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BOOM !!! I get the correct result (I actually thought of this whilst typing the comment but figured the info might help someone at some point in time) So, then I tried the following... 
my @SubDirs = split("\\\\", $PathOnly);

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This also worked as I wanted. So, my original question has changed from "How do I split a Windows path on \ ?" to "Why does "\\\\" work in the split statement? I have been working with Perl on and off for about 20 years but I am by no means an expert, but this conundrum completely confuses me. BR, Steve

In reply to Re: Single Quotes - how to avoid any escape processing? by SteveDC
in thread Single Quotes - how to avoid any escape processing? by temporal

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