As others have said, File::Basename is definitely the right way to go for this particular problem.

In general, though, you can do this sort of thing with a regular expression by using a character class that doesn't include the seperator. For example: 

if ($path =~ m|^(.*)/[^/]*$|)
{
  $dir = $1;
}

[download]
will grab everything up to the last slash.

--
sgifford's Web page

In reply to Re: match only last character of a kind by sgifford
in thread match only last character of a kind by duc

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