-----Original Message-----
From: L. Walsh
Sent: Saturday, March 07, 2015 5:21 PM
To: sisyph...@optusnet.com.au
Cc: Strawberry Perl
Subject: Re: Mixing of forward and back slashes in paths?
And if you do:
$^X = "C:\Strawberry\perl\bin\perl.exe";
I don't do it -- perl does it. Look at the listing for PERL5LIB at the
bottom of the report:
The setting of these things are determined by what's in the perl source
distro and ought therefore be dealt with at the perl source level - so it
needs to be achieved by patching the perl source (and perhaps some of the
core modules).
I build perl from source myself - and see the same mixture of forward and
backward slashes in paths.
I don't see it as being Strawberry's responsibility to deal with this (but I
have no official position with the Strawberry project).
On Windows 7, I strike occasions where forward slashes are unworkable and
need to be replaced by backslashes - so I'd be very annoyed if perl were
ever to forbid the backslash in a path (or automatically convert it to a
forward slash).
Here's an example of forward slashes being unworkable on my Windows 7 box.
It relies on the existence of ../doc.txt.
###########################
use warnings;
use strict;
my $f1 = '../doc.txt';
my $f2 = "../doc.txt";
my $f3 = '..\doc.txt';
my $f4 = "..\\doc.txt";
# will fail
warn "failed to copy $f1 to dac.txt"
if system 'copy', $f1, 'dac.txt';
# will fail
warn "failed to copy $f2 to dec.txt"
if system 'copy', $f2, 'dec.txt';
# will succeed
warn "failed to copy $f3 to dic.txt"
if system 'copy', $f3, 'dic.txt';
# will succeed
warn "failed to copy $f4 to duc.txt"
if system 'copy', $f4, 'duc.txt';
###########################
I don't know if the behaviour I see from this script is common.
Even if perl were to convert the backslash to forward slash for display
purposes only, I would be very annoyed.
If I were to "say $f1;" in the above script, I would expect to see what's
actually there - namely "..\doc.txt".
But it's not me you need to convince about this - it's p5p .... or kmx (who
does have an official position with the Strawberry project).
I suspect it's now too late for either p5p or kmx to do anything about this
for the upcoming 5.22 - maybe take it up in the next round of blead releases
(5.23) ?
Cheers,
Rob
