Handling Directory names containing spaces in list of paths

Many a times we see some configuration files which have list of paths like:

/abc/123_1/1tvd/fiel.txt
/abc/123 r/1tvd/fie2l.txt
/abc/123 a/1tvd/fie3l.txt
/abc xyz/123/1tvd/fie4l.txt

and some times the spaces create a lot of problems while we use those configuration files.
in such cases we need to make those directory names as

/"abc xyz"/123/1tvd/fie4l.txt

But how do we do it across the complete file?

Below is the perl way to do it:

perl -F"/" -ane 'foreach (@F){if(/ /){$_="\"".$_."\"";}}print join "/",@F;' config_file

But yes there can be other ways too.