If you need to change the path separator based on underlying OS, File::Spec's catfile and catdir should help. It's a standard module, and its purpose is to "portably perform operations on file names".

An example:

#!perl
use File::Spec::Functions;
print catfile( qw/dir subdir file/ );
__END__
On my FreeBSD box, the result is "dir/subdir/file"
On my Win2K box  , the result is "dir\subdir\file"
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use strict;
use File::Spec::Functions;
use Data::Dumper;  # for debugging purpose only

my $path = canonpath("../somedir/path/");
print "$path\n";

my @dirs = qw( ../dir/path1 ../dir/path2 );
my @canon_dirs = map { canonpath($_) } @dirs;
print Dumper(\@canon_dirs);
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../somedir/path
$VAR1 = [
          '../dir/path1',
          '../dir/path2'
        ];
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..\somedir\path
$VAR1 = [
          '..\\dir\\path1',
          '..\\dir\\path2'
        ];
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use strict;
use File::Spec::Functions;

my %root = (
  MSWin32 => "C:\\Data",
  solaris => "/var/data",
);

my $ROOTDIR = $root{$^O} or die "Unknown platform";

my $file1 = canonpath("$ROOTDIR/data.txt");
print "$file1\n";
my $file2 = canonpath("$ROOTDIR/../input/data2.txt");
print "$file2\n";
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C:\Data\data.txt
C:\Data\..\input\data2.txt
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/var/data/data.txt
/var/data/../input/data2.txt
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Thanks that's exactly what I was looking for.. I would rather not entrust it to the perl interpreter.

---

Grygonos

You can use / safely for both Unix and Win32. Perl will know which one to use and abstract that away from the code. To detect if you're on a windows machine, check the contents of $^O (see perlvar).

Not entirely true though. Whether a bug or not, the ActiveState Perl 5.8 under Windows does not interprete the path delimiter in qx/ / or ` ` correctly if you use the unix forward slashes (/) and you will get run-time errors. There was a discussion on this particular issue last month.

if you use qw{ } would that not correct it for qw?

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Grygonos