rjt, Thanks for the follow up. I misunderstood a few things you said in your posts. The random characters you were referring to were characters in the filename. I only put a random character in my filename to test my logic in case there was a problem with opening a file. Also, I noticed on rereading your post you were talking about the colon being the volume separator not a path separator.

Thanks for the link to File::Spec. It looks very useful for the kind of backend server work I do.