What I really want is to have the same nice quoting behaviors in my one liners that I am used to in perl. Dos is weird with quotes. I was wondering if there is some kind of workaround.

I would like to be able to do

perl -e "$helloWorld = '"hello world"'; print "$helloWorld"";
[download]

perl -e "$helloWorld = '\"hello world\"'; print "$helloWorld"";
[download]

as, with gellyfish's help, I now know to do.

I guess maybe this really isn't *that* "hellish" but it isn't anywhere near as heavenly as perl outside of the dos shell. So, if there is some other trick...

when you print $whatever you don't need to print "$whatever" unless you want to print "$whatever and $something else in the same string" - that'll at least save you two backslashed double quotes.

that said, the point is that with the windows command shell the double quote is the string quoting character so in order not to have your perl -e code string stop at the next ", you have to escape it for the shell's benefit. to illustrate - escaping outside of the -e code: perl -e "print qq(@ARGV)" \"hello world\"

I guess the trick is that you use single quotes instead ;)

perl -e "$helloworld = qq('hello world'); print $helloworld"

   larryk                                          
perl -le "s,,reverse killer,e,y,rifle,lycra,,print"