in reply to Execute command with spaces in perl

Your quoting does not match how the Windows shell (cmd.exe) processes quotes.

cmd.exe does not recognize a backslash before a space as the intention to quote that space. A working invocation of firefox.exe could be:

my $ff_exe = q{C:\\Program Files\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe};
my @cmd = ($ff_exe, '--version');
my $shell_command = join " ",                    # separate by spaces
                    map { /\s/ ? qq{"$_"} : $_ } # enclose in double q
+uotes if needed
                    @cmd;
print $shell_command;

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Note that under Windows, the --version command line switch does not output anything.

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Re^2: Execute command with spaces in perl
by pryrt (Abbot) on Aug 27, 2018 at 15:52 UTC

    Interestingly, it doesn't output anything normally (to the cmd.exe window), but it does output when the output is piped or redirected:

    C:\usr\local\share\PassThru\perl>"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\fir
+efox.exe" --version

C:\usr\local\share\PassThru\perl>"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\fir
+efox.exe" --version | perl -e "print $_ for <>"
Mozilla Firefox 61.0.2

C:\usr\local\share\PassThru\perl>"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\fir
+efox.exe" --version > out.txt

C:\usr\local\share\PassThru\perl>type out.txt
Mozilla Firefox 61.0.2

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    I actually first noticed it inside perl, using the piped open described elsewhere, while writing Re^5: Execute command with spaces in perl:

    C:\usr\local\share\PassThru\perl>perl -Mwarnings -Mstrict -e "my $cmd 
+= q|C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe|; open my $fh, '-|',
+ $cmd, '--version' or die $!; my $out = do { local $/; <$fh> }; close
+ $fh or die $! ? $! : qq(\$?=$?); print $out"
Mozilla Firefox 61.0.2

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