On Win2k, "cmd /c start <filename>" may do what you want. An cmd window does pop up, but immediately goes away.

I tried namely

perldoc Win32::Process

! The main problem is I can not 'invoke' pdf files directly using it.

OTOH I've almost solved this by determining of associated to '.pdf' command line and invoking that file. So, following works (with console window appearing for half of a second and then disappearing):

use Win32::Process;

sub ErrorReport{
  print Win32::FormatMessage(Win32::GetLastError());
}
my ($ftype) = `assoc .pdf`=~/=(.*)/;
print $ftype,"\n";
my ($apath) = `ftype $ftype`=~/=(.*)/;
print $apath,"\n";
my $procobj;
$apath=~s/"%1"$//;
$apath=~s/^"//;
$apath=~s/"\s*$//;
Win32::Process::Create(
  $procobj,
  "$apath",
  "x D:\\WORK\\Documentation\\cd-writing\\perl-technology\\root-cd-tk\
+\files\\PSAX1250_IG_R610_Iss1-mp.pdf",
  0,
  NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS,
  "."
)  || die ErrorReport();
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This works good. May be it is needed to search in registry instead of `assoc` and `ftype`. When I'll come with a final solution I'll probably report this in 'code' section.

Here's a better solution, using the ShellExecute API. This works as-is:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
#use diagnostics;
use warnings;
use Win32::API;

my $ShellExecute = new Win32::API("shell32", "ShellExecute", [qw(N P P
+ P P N)], 'N');
my $hWnd;

$ShellExecute->Call($hWnd, 'open', 'c:/rc.d.pdf', undef, undef, 1);
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Try perldoc Win32::API, then find a good API reference. A lot of VB oriented sites will have good info.