Hi,

We are a multi-platform development site, and part of our build system uses a combination of File::Spec::canonpath and File::Spec::catfile to correctly arrange a network path.

This code has broken with Win7/WinServer2008.

It can be easily demonstrated. 

        use File::Spec;
        
        $bif_path = "/foo/go/do";
        $bif_path = File::Spec->canonpath ($bif_path);
        print "canonpath: $bif_path\n";
        $bif_path = File::Spec->catfile ('', $bif_path);
        print "catfile: $bif_path\n";

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On WINXP and previous Win versions the path is converted to 
"\\foo\go\do"

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However, on Win7, the string is returned as 
"\foo\go\do"

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The single "\" reference fails on Win7, it still needs to be "\\".

Following the code in the debugger, it appears the "\\" is stripped by line 397 of "_canon_cat" for "performance."

Has anyone else bumped into this?

I am wondering if it is Perl or something to do with the network path being treated as local?

Or, have we been doing this as a convenience and it shouldn't have been written in this manner in the first place?

No idea.

Any help greatly appreciated.

In reply to Failure of catfile on Windows 7 by Anonymous Monk

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