perltutorial tachyon <p>Different Operating Systems use different characters as their path separator when specifying directory and file paths: <pre> foo/bar/baz # *nix uses a / foo\bar\baz # Win32 uses a \ foo:bar:baz # Mac OS 9 uses a : foo/bar/baz # Mac OS X uses a / (usually!) </pre> <p>In Perl you can generally just use a / as your path separator (except on Mac OS 9, thanks [Hanamaki]). Why? Because Perl will <b>automagically</b> convert the / to the correct path separator for the system it is running on! This means that coding Windows paths like this <pre>$path = "\\foo\\bar\\baz";</pre> <p>is not required. You can just use this: <pre>$path = "/foo/bar/baz";</pre> <p>and things will be fine. In fact using \\ can be problematic, but you probably already know that :-) <p>If you want to display the expected system delimiter to a user (ie hide the fact that you are using / internally) you can just do something like this: <code>my $perl_path = '/foo/bar/baz'; (my $win_path = $perl_path) =~ tr!/!\\!; print "Perl still sees: $perl_path\n"; print "But we can print: $win_path\n"; </code> <p>If you need to do lots of conversions just write a sub like this: <code>my $perl_path = '/foo/bar/baz'; print "This is the Windows path: ", win_path($perl_path), "\n"; sub win_path { (my $path = shift) =~ tr!/!\\!; return $path; } </code> So there you have it. Paths in Perl. By using a / you make it much easier to port your code to another system. For truly portable methods look into the [File::Spec] module (part of the standard distro) and [perlman:perlport]. Thanks to [wog] and [Hanamaki] for this suggestion. And if you have been converting / to \\ ....