I understand the danger. That's why I gave the warning at the end. However, notice the context of the string in which he's interested. It's a filepath, which means that it might not have been input by hand, but by some directory walker. In that case he may not be able to insert a '\' or catch the '$' before it interpolates. In that extreme case, he may choose to change the new-line character, but should only do so temporarily. Of course it's dangerous, but it's the bad-boy solutions that perl allows that make it such a wonderful language to use. Document it well, and be smart about it, and it should work fine.