kennethk, thank you for the reply.

I do realize that . is a metacharacter. I did not know about the interpolation. So what you said makes sense for me up until the single quote doubled escaped . e.g. \\. The split function does split the string into data1 and txt Shouldn't it work like the last example where the first variable is the complete filename since the literal \. was not encountered?

Also, as . is any single printable character, why doesn't split bust the expression apart into NULL and ata1.txt? I did your trick with the join (thanks for that by the way) but split is apparently not returning anything

In reply to Re^2: double quote vs single quote oddities. I need enlightenment by lyapunov
in thread double quote vs single quote oddities. I need enlightenment by lyapunov

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