I'm relatively new to perl, so I don't know if my problem was a bug, quirk, feature, or whatnot, but I thought I would post it here to see what more experienced monks might think.

So the point of the program is to search through a directory and pull data from text files of a certain name and then write that data to an excel file. I also want to take part of the directory for use as a worksheet name, which is where I was having my problem. The relevant code, set up to produce the error:

use warnings;
use strict;
use File::Find;

my $directory = "\.\\v706_7-17";  # Set directory to search

find(\&wanted, $directory);

sub wanted {
    return unless -f;  # Operate only on files, not directories
    my $curfile = $_;
    if ($curfile =~ m|list\$\$|i) {  # If the file is a LIST$$
        print "$directory\n";  # For debug purposes
        print "$File::Find::dir\n";  # For debug purposes

        $File::Find::dir =~ m|$directory\/(.*)|;  # Variable way that 
+didn't work
        # $File::Find::dir =~ m|\.\\v706_7-17\/(.*)|;  # Hardcoded way
+ that worked

        my $name = $1;
        $name =~ s|\/| |;  # Replace "/" with " " for use in naming th
+e worksheet
        ... #and on to the rest of the code.
[download]

I'm on a windows system, which is why I set the search directory to .\v706_7-17 instead of ./v706_7-17. The debug prints gave the expected results:

.\v706_7-17
.\v706_7-17/DSP-23/6DCL_Ada_Sci
[download]

But only the hardcoded version of the regex would find a match. Then, I tried changing the backslash to a forwardslash on the original search directory:

my $directory = "\.\/v706_7-17";  # Set directory to search
[download]

And I was greeted with success. The variable regex found a match and everything worked as it should. The debug printouts also gave the expected results:

./v706_7-17
./v706_7-17/DSP-23/6DCL_Ada_Sci
[download]

So all in all, I found the whole thing a little strange that the debug printouts would match, but the regex wouldn't work as intended with the backslash.

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