1. you bust out your shell's manual, and learn that it ain't *nix (you can't escape spaces, you need to "quote" stuff).

2. this is also documented in perlrun, don't you ever perl -e " die scalar gmtime " ?

my $arg = q{butteer "scotch"};
$arg =~ s{"}{\\"}g;
system (qq{blah "$arg" ....});
[download]

update: also, perldoc -f system

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