Question

I want to wrap a Perl one-liner in a batch file. For a (trivial) example, in a Unix shell, I could quote up a command like this:

perl -e 'print localtime() . '\n'' 

But DOS chokes on that with this helpful error message:

Can’t find string terminator ”’ anywhere before EOF at -e line 1.

What’s the best way to do this within a .bat file?

Answer 1

For Perl stuff on Windows, I try to use the generalized quoting as much as possible so I don’t get leaning toothpick syndrome. I save the quotes for the stuff that DOS needs:

perl -e 'print scalar localtime() . qq(\n)' 

If you just need a newline at the end of the print, you can let the -l switch do that for you:

perl -le 'print scalar localtime()' 

For other cool things you can do with switches, see the perlrun documentation.