C:\>more foo bar baz.pl Cannot access file C:\foo C:\>more "foo bar baz.pl" print "foo bar baz.pl says hi"; C:\>perl my @args = ( $^X, 'foo bar baz.pl' ); warn " while going through the shell ret = ".system "@args"; warn " while avoding the shell ret = ".system {$args[0]} @args; __END__ Can't open perl script "foo": No such file or directory while going through the shell ret = 512 at - line 2. foo bar baz.pl says hi while avoding the shell ret = 0 at - line 3.