Re: Opening a MacOS package

[Ken Williams]

On Wednesday, November 6, 2002, at 11:05  AM, John Delacour wrote:

At 10:34 am +1100 6/11/02, Ken Williams wrote:

This line has the exact same problem as your last script....

No, I have now discovered the true cause of the problem. Perl requires the "-" and the "@" to be escaped. Quite why, perhaps someone can tell me,

The '@' has to be escaped in a string like "POP-
eremita\@pop3.demon.co.uk" because otherwise Perl thinks you're talking about the @pop3 array. The '-' doesn't have to be escaped, it's not a special character in a string.

 but I suspect Apple's own filename is illegal.

No, those characters are just fine in filenames.

However, this does not explain why

     cd [EMAIL PROTECTED]

works in the shell wqithout complaint.

Just because those characters are just fine in filenames. The only reason '@' is considered a "weird" character is that it's easy for programmers to make mistakes when dealing with them, so sometimes people avoid using them in the first place. I think the only official ASCII characters that are disallowed in filenames are '/' and '\0', with ':' not usually a very good idea.

-Ken