... I didn't think that quote (') was a shell metacharacter and it's not listed in the bash manpage as one.

Okay, technically, quotation marks are not called "metacharacters" in the bash man page -- the first thing you find is this:

DEFINITIONS
 ...
 metacharacter
      A  character  that, when unquoted, separates words.
      One of the following:
      |  & ; ( ) < > space tab
But then farther down (way farther -- bash has a big man page), there's a whole "chapter" called QUOTING, which makes it clear that single and double quotes have special (distinct) meanings in shell commands. It's this notion of "having special meaning to the shell" that defines the set of things counted as "metacharacters" in a pipeline command string that you pass the perl's open() call. Granted, the terminology is a little slippery here.

In reply to Re: open won't die by graff
in thread open won't die by YuckFoo

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.