Just like the Perl code 'abc' produces the string abc, the shell code 'abc' produces the sequence abc. What you printed is literally what the shell passed to perl.

To pass 'some_job2.pl -x abc', you could use

\''some_job2.pl -x abc'\'
"'"'some_job2.pl -x abc'"'"
"'some_job2.pl -x abc'"
\'some_job2.pl\ -x\ abc\'
etc
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