Indeed... but what's the equivalent in a system call?

In any case, the testcase using 'echo' was simply to demonstrate the problem; it reproduces in any variety of ways, e.g.

  cd C:\temp
  perl -e 'system("pwd; pwd");'
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results in

  pwd [-LP] [-d path]
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in other words, a usage error... but *nix/MKS perl produces:

  c:/temp
  c:/temp
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I guess, in summary, what I'm asking is how a multi-command system call is made with standard Windows PERL distribs

Indeed... but what's the equivalent in a system call?

system takes a shell command, so the equivalent of

echo "1 & echo 2 & echo 3" & echo two dos & echo t
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using system is

system('echo "1 & echo 2 & echo 3" & echo two dos & echo t');
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---

Do you realize you are launching a Windows build of Perl (ActivePerl or Strawberry Perl?), and that Windows build of Perl launch cmd rather than (non-existent) /bin/sh? In other words,

system('pwd; pwd');
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is the same as

system('cmd', '/x', '/c', 'pwd; pwd');
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Perhaps you are looking for

# Adjust the path for your system
system('c:\\progs\\cygwin\\bin\\sh', '-c', 'pwd; pwd');
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Thank you very much indeed for your analysis, and your code samples, and for the overall illumination provided

Do you get the same output from

C:\temp> pwd; pwd
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as you do from

C:\temp> perl -e 'system("pwd; pwd");'
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Do the same check for:

C:\temp> echo 1; echo 2; echo 3
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From Perl, you may need to put each command in an array and use "system $_ for @cmds", e.g.

$ perl -e 'my @cmds = ("echo 1", "echo 2", "echo 3", "pwd", "pwd"); sy
+stem $_ for @cmds'
1
2
3
/Users/ken/tmp
/Users/ken/tmp
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[I don't have Perl running on any MSWin platform, so I can't test this for you.]

-- Ken

Hi Ken, thanks for that nice option, it doesn't quite work from the command line (issues identifying the closing "'"), but from a script it does the trick regardless of PERL distrib used