Other monks have provided the answer you were looking for. A debugging technique I use is to remove as much code as possible to still reproduce the problem. Combining this with use diagnostics;, it may have been more evident what the real issue was, rather than the misleading "Bareword" error.

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use strict;
use warnings;
use diagnostics;

my $path = 'C:\chas_sandbox\';
print $path;
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outputs:

Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at ./686348.pl li
+ne 7 (#1)
    (F) Perl strings can stretch over multiple lines.  This message me
+ans
    that the closing delimiter was omitted.  Because bracketed quotes 
+count
    nesting levels, the following is missing its final parenthesis:

        print q(The character '(' starts a side comment.);

    If you're getting this error from a here-document, you may have in
+cluded
    unseen whitespace before or after your closing tag. A good program
+mer's
    editor will have a way to help you find these characters.

Uncaught exception from user code:
        Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at ./6863
+48.pl line 7.
 at ./686348.pl line 7
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Hope this helps.