Question

Due to some messed up legacy code,

I have

$path = [OS specific base DIR name][hardcoded Linux file path]

So on Linux, it is something like

$path = /common/path/to/dir/pathtofile/name.extension

but on Windows it becomes this

$path = C:\path\to\dir\pathtofile/name.extension

Some of the code fails on Windows because it is expecting a \ while it gets a /.

Is there a Perl function that can help me here?

Something like

print "$path\n";
$path = <some function> $path;
print "$path\n";

C:\path\to\dir\pathtofile/name.extension
C:\path\to\dir\pathtofile\name.extension

Answer 1

The File::Spec family of modules exists exactly for that reason. You might want to consider using that instead of hardcoding unix paths.

use File::Spec::Functions 'catfile';

my $path = catfile($os_specific_base_dir, 'pathtofile', 'name.extension');

If you really need to hardcode unix paths somewhere, which really doesn’t seem like a good idea, you should probably use File::Spec::Unix to split up the path into its components, and then use the File::Spec variant native to your target system to build put the components back together again.