Thanks! Not sure if it’s what you had in mind, but your advice:

make a hard link with a shorter name without spaces and amperstands

gave me the clue I needed: I replaced the directory name with its DOS short name (8.3 format) obtained via dir /x. This is a better solution, as it means I only have to make a single change to the environment variable definition, instead of updating a separate batch file for each Strawberry Perl portable edition.

Thanks again,