RE: RE: slash converter

[Adam]

<quote>"You do know that Win32 systems can use forward slashes, right? c:/windows/temp is valid."</quote>
This is no longer true. Win2K does not support the forward slash anymore. It assumes that you are refering to a flag of somekind and bombs out with an error.

UPDATE: Since KM does not believe me that Win2K will bomb I went back to my W2K box and ran a simple test. I opened a command prompt at the C:\ level and called
dir c:\perl5
    and
dir c:/perl5
and what-do-you-know! The first method (backslash) returned the contents of the perl5 directory and the second method (forward-slash) generated the error:

Parameter format not correct - "perl5".

I hope this is sufficient information for you KM.

[Fastolfe]

Does this apply to both Perl functions and command-line arguments, or just the CLI? "Switches" in filenames is particularly useless, so I wonder if an open(F, "/somedir/filename.txt") would work identically on Unix and Win2k?

[Shendal]

(posted by request from chatterbox)

Yes, it works the same on Win2k. Of course, it will assume the root on the current drive letter, though (use chdir to change drive letters).

Here's an example to illustrate the point:


#!perl -w
use strict; # always

open(F,">/temp/foo.txt") 
    or die "Unable to open temp file for write: $!\n";
print F "This is a test.  This is only a test.\n";
close(F);

open(F,"/temp/foo.txt") 
    or die "Unable to open temp file for read: $!\n";
while (<F>) { print "foo: $_"; }
close(F);

unlink ("/temp/foo.txt");

...which outputs:


foo: This is a test.  This is only a test.



Cheers,
Shendal

[Fastolfe]

In write-mode also? E.g. open(F, ">/somedir/filename.txt") In other words, does it correctly create this new file as c:\somedir\filename.txt?

(Update: The original node was updated, answering this question.)

[OzzyOsbourne]

Because I work in Perl exclusively on a win2k box, run scripts from that box daily that use the forward slash, and only use the forward slash b/c I hate writing \\\\ before a server, you can mark me a dissenter.

The forward slash absolutely works with an install of ActiveState 6.15 on a win2k box

Update:I did something like the original post in this thread here

-OzzyOsbourne

[Fastolfe]

Of course, you can avoid escaping back-slashes by putting everything in single-quotes, but that makes variable interpolation somewhat messy.

[tilly]

One of the (for me) more annoying gotchas. Inside a single-quoted string, \ is still special. '\\' is just a single \, and '\'' is a single-quote.

So if you need to, by chance, wind up with \\, even with a single quote you still find yourself doing \\\\.

[Shendal]

FWIW, dir "C:/TEMP" does work.

Cheers,
Shendal

[KM]

I feel lucky that I wouldn't know that Win2K no longer supports this. However, I would need to see it to believe it. I do know that 98/NT does support this.

Cheers,
KM