I am trying to think of a good way to write to a file
a path/filename along with some additional data,
and then read it back later. While this is strictly
Linux now, I would like the code to work across
platforms if possible.

I realize that I will have to deal with translation
of the path delimiter characters. What I'm wondering
about is how to deal with a potentially unlimited
set of characters in file names.

For example, consider the really simple file format:
/usr/bin/vi:lrwxrwxrwx:root:root

I can easily parse this with split but things are
going to break when a file or directory name contains
a colon or whatever I have chosen as my delimiter.

Workarounds I thought about such as escaping characters
all seemed rather ugly. I have to think this problem has
been solved many times before. And I did do some CPAN
searching for things dealing with file names before
posting, but didn't spot anything that addressed this.

Are there any CPAN or other well known solutions to
take care of a task such as this?

Bonus question: Can I serialize a data structure on
one machine then un-serialize on another, possibly of
a different OS and maybe slightly different PERL version?
Stated another way, how much divergence between two
systems is tolerated with a serialized data structure?

- Dale



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