By Hero Zzyzzx : The things I'll discuss here are aimed at new/intermediate perl coders that know basic *nix commands: ls,cd,chmod,chgrp,mv,cp, etc., meaning I'm not going to discuss these. I also assume you can use man and understand how to use telnet/ssh to get to your server. I realize that what I discuss here isn't specific to perl (or even CGI programming with perl) but is still (IMHO) very useful. If you want to know perl tricks to ease debugging, read the other tutorials in this section.
Traditionally, Unix/Linux/POSIX filenames can be almost any sequence of bytes, and their meaning is unassigned. The only real rules are that "/" is always the directory separator, and that filenames can't contain byte 0 (because this is the terminator). Although this is flexible, this creates many unnecessary problems. In particular, this lack of limitations makes it unnecessarily difficult to write correct programs (enabling many security flaws), makes it impossible to consistently and accurately display filenames, causes portability problems, and confuses users. more ....
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