dhjackal has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hello all, I'm fairly new to perl and have stumbled upon a problem creating directories with spaces in the names. For example 
my $dir = "D:\Temp\Test directory\Logs" ;

$dir =~ s/\\/\//g ; 

mkdir ($dir) || die "Cannot mkdir $dir: $!" ;

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I've tried single and double quotes but to no avail Anybody know the way round this? All help appreciated Declan

Edited (davorg) - added code tags

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Re: directories with spaces
by davorg (Chancellor) on Nov 08, 2006 at 09:33 UTC

    Well, you're printing out the error message, so don't keep it to yourself - tell us exactly what it says.

    I don't know much about Windows, but I suspect that printing the $dir variable in the error message (as you do) will give you a clue as to what is going wrong.

    Have you trying putting your directory name in single quotes? Does that make any difference? The backslash character has a special meaning in double quotes[1].

    [1] Yes, it has a special meaning in single quotes too. But it's _less_ special :-)

    --
    <http://dave.org.uk>

    "The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
    -- Chip Salzenberg

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      Thanks davorg, I managed to resolve the issue, the error i was getting was 

      Cannot mkdir D:/Temp/ExpImpTest2/Declan test/here/Logs: No such file o
+r directory at C:\Documents and Settings\dheerey\Desktop\Development\
+Perl\PSGUtility\test2.pl line 38, <DATA> line 164

      [download]

      In the end i moved from mkdir to mkpath and removed the double quotes from my path name. The code now looks (and works) like: 

      use File::Path ;

my $dir = 'D:\Temp\ExpImpTest2\Declan test2\here\Logs' ;

$dir =~ s/\\/\//g ; 

mkpath ($dir) || die "Cannot create $dir: $!" ;

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      Thanks again

      20061109 Janitored by Corion: Added formatting, code tags, as per Writeup Formatting Tips

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