Yes, I meant forward slash, which is what slash usually means - the other one is called backslash, after all. And yes, I knew the colon is reserved on Mac (as it is on DOSish systems, btw), though I wasn't sure about the slash being legal. At any rate, yeah, that was my point. You can only rely on the nullbyte being illegal.. on most systems that commonly run Perl the slash is also, but even that's already not fully portable anymore.

The only thing I hate about File::Spec is its (IMHO) misguided attempt to reduce namespace clutter and forcing a lot of typing on the user instead. Of course there's File::Spec::Functions.. what a mess. </rant>

Makeshifts last the longest.