The following line works, even though I forgot to double quote the variable.
my $student_directory = '/data/students/' . $student_id; When I noticed this, I thought this was convenient: perl is trying to “do the right thing.” But I worry that leaving them out may be bad coding practice; if so, or you see other worthwhile improvements, please let me know. More importantly, I wonder how perl knows to do this. Perhaps context provided by the assignment operator or the concatenation operator? If there is a general rule on this, it would help me to know more widely when I can omit double quotes. Thanks! Rick Triplett
