Perl "
quote words"
operator.
Whitespace-separated
words enclosed between the
delimiters are
quoted and returned as a
list. So qw/a b c d/ is a
streamlined way of saying ('a','b','c','d').
As with all other q* quoting operators, you get to pick your own delimiters, so qw(foo bar baz quux) also works.
Important note!
A common
error is to try to use
commas to separate the items inside qw//. Since it splits on whitespace, this gives totally unexpected results!
perl -w will warn about this.