Question

I’m trying to concatenate this string in Perl: “/.hush_profile”;

I keep getting a problem when I add in “/” into the string. I’ve tried escaping it, but that won’t work either.

Here’s my line of problem code:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my($fileloc, $home_dir);

$home_dir = $ENV{"HOME"};
$fileloc = $home_dir;
$fileloc .= "/.hush_profile";

Answer 1

This adaptation of your code gives me the expected output:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my($fileloc);

my $home_dir = $ENV{"HOME"};
print "home_dir = $home_dir\n";
$fileloc = $home_dir;
print "fileloc 1 = $fileloc\n";
$fileloc .= "/.hush_profile";
print "fileloc 2 = $fileloc\n";

Output:

home_dir = /work4/jleffler
fileloc 1 = /work4/jleffler
fileloc 2 = /work4/jleffler/.hush_profile

Even if I unset $HOME in the environment, I get something:

$ (unset HOME; perl x.pl)
Use of uninitialized value $home_dir in concatenation (.) or string at x.pl line 6.
home_dir = 
Use of uninitialized value $fileloc in concatenation (.) or string at x.pl line 8.
fileloc 1 = 
fileloc 2 = /.hush_profile
$

This happens to be Perl 5.12.1 on RHEL 5 (x86/64), but I get the same with Perl 5.8.8 on the same platform.