Okay, I even went out of my way and renamed some things so that I had spaces in my path but that didn't change my results. This type of stuff has changed between versions of Perl so perhaps that explains our different results. I was doing this testing using v5.6.0 ActivePerl build 616.

I suspect that Perl's 'if CreateProcess() fails, then just retry with CreateProcess("cmd.exe","/c ...",...)' logic is masking the real error here. I'd think that using an indirect object with system would disable that logic, but I haven't checked that.

In any case, you can always do:

use Win32;
$vss= Win32::GetShortPathName( "D:\\Program Files\\"
    . "Microsoft Visual Studio\\Common\\VSS\\win32\\ss.exe");
[download]

and I'm pretty sure that will fix errors due to spaces in file names.

You also might want to try Win32::Process to see if you can reproduce why Perl thinks CreateProcess() is failing.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")