How do you remove a metacharacter from a file name. I have a filename of cos.NEW&OLD.0826.12345 but the perl script only recognizes cos.NEW. The NEW&OLD is a EDI Trading Partner ID. I want to remove the ampersand and replace it with an underline so that the code does not generate a false alert. I tried $script=~s/(\W)/_/g; but is that to replace what is in the contents of the file because I am still getting the error message.

08/26/2009_16:16:36 14802 ***ERROR: cannot upload data file /usr/edi/cos.NEW&OLD.0826.14802 into Database 08/26/2009_16:16:36 14802 *** ALERT 521

Snippet of code below

$script=$ARGV[3];         # Value of this $ARGV is   NEW&OLD
:
:
$otis_db="$base_dir/otis_db/cos.$script.$cdate.$pid";
:
:
:
:
        chomp($end_date=`date +%m/%d/%Y_%T`);
        $end_date=~s/_/ /g;
        $values="(\'$file_name\',\'$send_from_dir\',\'$serv_ref\',TO_D
+ATE\(\'$end_date\',\'MM\/DD\/YYYY HH24:MI:SS\'))\;";
:
I placed this line right before the echo statement.  Was getting an er
+ror could not upload " cos.NEW&OLD.082609.12345" because it could not
+ be found.  But it did create the file "cos.NEW".  The & and anything
+ after is ignored. 
        $script=~s/(\W)/_/g;
:
        `echo "INSERT into COSBRIDGE\n\tvalues$values\n" >> $otis_db`;

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In reply to Removing a Metacharacter from a filename by sputnik

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