my $dir = "c:\\temp\\";

For the benefit of any who might not know: You don't need to use backslashes when running on a Windows machine; Perl will do the right thing and convert a forward-slash path delimiter to the appropriate delimiter for whatever platform it's running on. That way you don't have to backslash escape your backslashes. You can just write:

my $dir = "c:/temp/";

which is just a little easier and less error prone, not to mention makes your programs a little less platform-specific. : )

Jon

Actually, it's not perl that does it. Forward slashes are recognized by Windows as equivalent to backslashes for purposes of path delimiting. It's only certain of the windows-based programs -- including the braindead command shell! -- that insist that forward slashes are only for indicating command-line options.

Thanks for the tip!
I can see it is useful in this and most other cases, but would it cause a problem if I wanted to concatenate $dir back with $_ and use it in a system call to DOS?
i.e. Perl likes /, but does DOS?

i'm sorry but i have lost a part of question: example: the folder is c:\temp - the file is pippo.tif. I need to create a href ..... of all files in $dir how can create ??? thank you claudia

my $dir = '/path'; # the directory to list
my $url = 'http://blah/path'; # the url for that directory

opendir DIR, $dir or dir $!;

my @links = map { qq(<a href="$url/$_">$_</a>) } readdir DIR;

use CGI qw(ul li);

print ul(li([@links]));
[download]

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

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

Try replacing the print statement above with :

print "<a href=\"$dir$_\">$_</a>\n"
[download]

I wonder if that is what you mean?

thank you for your help claudia