A basic item in the toolset you need is the escape character, which (I assume you already know) is the backslash. But it can be used to escape itself, too:

my @backslash_delimited_parts = split /\\/, $string;
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You didn't directly ask for it, but here's something I find useful in assigning bits of an array to named variables (which it doesn't seem you *need*, although here the names help to document what's being done):

my ($date, $time, $disk, $user) = @x[1,2,12,16];
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That there syntax is an array slice, by the way.

HTH!

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
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