The problem is that the history command isn't a bash executable, and so doesn't work in the context of a system() call by Perl.

Might Term::UI::History be of help here ?
Looks like accessing the shell's history is the only hope.

Thanks for the confirmations that this isn't trivial anywhere except MS Windows shells (which, I'm assuming, arises because on Windows the backslash is not necessarily an escape).
I have a perl script that I can use to transfer files from my Windows 7 box to my Ubuntu box. If I do perl get.pl C:/some/file all is fine. I was merely hoping to catch the error when I inadvertently do perl get.pl C:\some\file.
It's not really such a big deal because I eventually find out about the error anyway - and it's not actually an error that I'm liable to make with great frequency.

Cheers,
Rob

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