On May 31, 2004, at 12:50 PM, Ian Ferguson wrote:
That seemed to fix it, but the escaped version still is not recognized.
It's not supposed to be recognized. Escapes are necessary in a shell,
because it uses white space as a delimiter, so white space that isn't
to be treated as such needs to be escaped.
I guess that this is a good time to ask whether or not Perl requires
me to
quote paths containing spaces
No, it doesn't. Is this a good time to ask what led you to believe it
might, or should? ;-)
or if it is smart enough to resolve things on its own.
There's nothing to resolve. The file name is (for example) "file name
space.txt". When you use that in a shell without escaping the spaces,
the shell splits it up into three separate arguments: ("file", "name",
"space.txt"). To prevent it from doing that - i.e. to tell the shell
that the spaces are part of a single argument, not delimiters between
multiple arguments - you escape the spaces.
In Perl, strings are most often delimited by single- and double-quotes,
not spaces. So spaces don't normally need to be escaped. But see
'perldoc perlop' - especially the "Quote and Quote-like Operators"
section. The point of having a variety of quote operators is to allow
you to choose a delimiter that doesn't appear in the input and thus
doesn't need to be escaped.
For example, if I had assigned $dir =
"/Users/my_username/Desktop/with spaces/" and then I was to rmdir(
$dir )
would this cause a problem or should I quote the variable rmdir(
"$dir" )?
It's unnecessary, and some members of the Cranky Perl Police will
chastise you for it. (See <http://tinyurl.com/2l6wm>). It *is* slightly
inefficient - a temporary string is created, and then $dir is
interpolated into the temp string - but the CPP makes entirely too big
an issue of it.
sherm--
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