The capital E Easier way is to join, just as yodabjorn suggested. If you go mucking about with $", you're liable to break things, due to the fact that $" is a global variable. Since that's like changing the value of pi, which would cause bridges to fall down, and dams to burst, somewhere else in that program there may be a piece of code that expects the default behavior and it won't work properly any more. join, of course, has no such "action at a distance".

If you absolutely must do this, declare your $" to be local:

local $" = " ";