On 15 January 2011 07:52, Emeka <emekami...@gmail.com> wrote: > # perl -le '$str = "the cat sat on the mat";print substr( $str, 4, -4 )' > Can't find string terminator "'" anywhere before EOF at -e line 1. > > rmicro@RMICRO-PC C:\Program Files\xampp > # > > It failed to work for me. Why?
Because you can't use single quotes for the script-string in Windows cmd.exe. If you must work in the command line, then you can either escape all your double quotes within the string or use qq~double-quoted string~ , where "~" can be any ascii character that is not in the string itself. perl -le "$str = qq~the cat sat on the mat~; print substr( $str, 4, -4 )" If I were beginning with Perl, I certainly would not practise in the console but get an editor, such as SciTE <http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html> and run the scripts from the editor (using F5) in the case of SciTE. JD -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/