Why would you assume that it is safe to convert every backslash in the entire Perl CD Bookshelf to a forward slash? This would blindly ruin every example in the suite of CD books! That's a case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Could you imagine reading the Camel book where someone has gone through it and changed every single backslash to a forward slash? The first hello world script would look like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
print "Hello world!/n";
[download]

...and for the record, "/n" is not the same thing as "\n".

No, the OP realy does probably need a token parser like HTML::TokeParser, and a routine a little smarter than blind transliteration.

One thing about the OP's post does bother me though. Does this conversion of file:\\\ to http:// mean that he's going to be making available ONLINE the entire Perl CD Bookshelf, in violation of O'Reilly's copyright?