I guess a bit off topic as you've gotten some good advice.. but I would recommend that you get out of the habit of using '\' in path names. This is just not necessary and this backslash the backslash stuff can get to be a mess!

In ancient DOS days, the backslash was required. But now with the MS command line, that is no longer true. The \ character is the escape character in string evaluation and it just causes problems. Use the *nix style /, forward slash. Of course remember that when making a path name, put double quotes around the string "$a/$b" otherwise Perl will figure that you are doing division! But in general forego this \ stuff.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $dir1 = 'Z:\My Documents\Workspace';   #you need single quote here 
my $versionFile = "$dir1\\version.txt";

print "$versionFile\n";   #Z:\My Documents\Workspace\version.txt

my $dirA = "Z:/My Documents/Workspace";   #with / "" is no problem
my $versionFileA = "$dirA/version.txt"; 

print "$versionFileA\n";   #Z:/My Documents/Workspace/version.txt
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Another tip for working with the command line, wild cards can be used like this: (not for use in a program, but for getting to where you want to go as a human without typing so much(

C:\>cd do*
C:\Documents and Settings>
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